“If you want to look at it that way. I don’t myself. I take it just as she meant it, and that’s as a deliberate insult.”
“But it isn’t an ‘insult’ if she only meant it to show she isn’t afraid of you, Lydia.”
“It is, though,” Mrs. Dodge insisted. “What she means is derision of me. It’s the same as if she said: ‘Here’s a slap in the face for you. I have the satisfaction of humiliating you as your punishment for knowing what you do know about me, and you can’t retaliate, because you aren’t important enough to be able to injure me!’ It’s just the same as if she’d said those words to me.”
“It seems quite a message,” he observed. “Of course, I can’t grasp it myself because I haven’t any conception of this ruinous proceeding of hers. You were the only witness, I assume?”
“There was a third person present,” Mrs. Dodge said, stiffly. “But not as a witness.”
“Then what was the third person present doing?”
Mrs. Dodge looked at him with severity, as if she reproved him for tempting her to do something wrong; then she took from a basket in her lap a square piece of partly embroidered linen and gave it her attention, not relaxing this preoccupation where her husband began to repeat his question.
“What was the third person——”
“I heard you,” Mrs. Dodge interrupted, frowning at her embroidery. “If I told you that much I’d be virtually telling the whole thing; and I’ve decided not to do that, even under her deliberate provocation. If I let myself be provoked into telling, I’d be as small as she is, so you needn’t hope to get another word out of me on the subject. The only answer I’ll make to your question is that the third person present was not her husband.”
“Oh!” Mr. Dodge said, loudly, and, in his sudden enlightenment, whistled “Whee-ew!” again. “So that’s it!”