“Didn’t I explain I’m not confiding in your discretion?” Mrs. Dodge returned. “Lately, I don’t believe you have any. I’ve told you this much so that next time you won’t be so hasty in sending checks to women who are merely using you to annoy your wife.”
He sighed. “There’s where you puzzle me, Lydia. If you found out something ruinous about Mrs. Braithwaite, as you say, and if she knows you did—you intimated she knows it, I think?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then I should think you’d be the last person in the world she’d want to annoy. I should think she’d do everything on earth to please you and placate you. She’d want to keep you from telling. That’s the weak point in your theory, Lydia.”
“It isn’t a theory. I’m speaking of facts.”
“But if she knows you’re aware of what might ruin her,” he insisted, “she would naturally be afraid of you. Then why would she do a thing that might infuriate you?”
“Because she’s a woman,” said Mrs. Dodge. “And that’s something you’ll never understand!”
“But even a woman would behave with some remnants of caution, under the circumstances, wouldn’t she?”
“Some women might. Mrs. Braithwaite doesn’t because she’s so sure of her lofty position she thinks she can deliberately insult me and I won’t dare to do anything about it. She wanted to show me that she isn’t afraid of me.”
Mr. Dodge looked thoughtfully at that point upon his long cigar where a slender ring of red glow intervened between the adhering gray ash and the brown tobacco. “Well, at least she shows a fiery heart,” he said. “In a way, you’d have to consider her action quite the sporting thing. You mean she’s sent you a kind of declaration of war, don’t you?”