As the two young women talked on, the builder gradually returned to her constrained attitude. She saw that Amy was taking to herself the whole credit for Overlook, was looking on Alois as simply a stimulant to her own great magnetism and artistic sense, was patronizing him as a capable and satisfactory agent for transmitting them into action. And this made her angry, not with Amy but with Alois. "Amy isn't to blame," she said to herself. "It's his fault. To please her he has been exaggerating her importance to herself, and he has succeeded in convincing her. She has ended up just where people always end up, when you encourage them to give their vanity its head." She tried to devise some way of helping her brother, of reminding Amy that he was entitled to credit for some small part of the success; but she could think of nothing to say that Amy would not misinterpret into jealousy either for herself or for her brother. When she got back to the offices, she said to him:
"If I were you, I'd not let a certain young woman imagine she has all the brains."
"What do you mean?" said he, clouding at once. He showed annoyance nowadays whenever she mentioned the Fosdicks.
"She'll soon be thinking you couldn't get along without her to give you ideas," replied Narcisse. "It's bad all round—bad for the woman, bad for the man—when he gets her too crazy about herself. She's likely to overlook his merits entirely in her excitement about her own."
"You are prejudiced against her, Narcisse," said Alois angrily. "And it isn't a bit like you to be so."
Narcisse, not being an angel, flared. "I'm not half as prejudiced against her as you'd be three months after you married her," she cried. "But you'll not get her, if you keep on as you're going now. Instead of showing her how awed you are by her, you'd better be teaching her that she ought to be in awe of you, that it's what you give her that makes her shine so bright."
And she fled to her own office, fuming against the folly of men and the silliness of women, and thoroughly miserable over the whole situation; for, at bottom she believed that such a woman as Amy must have feminine instinct enough fairly to jump at such a man as Alois, if there was a chance to attach him permanently; and, the prospect of Alois marrying a woman who could do him no good, who was all take and no give, put her into such a frame of mind that she wished she had the mean streak necessary to intriguing him and her apart.
It was on one of the bluest of her blue days of forebodings about Alois and Amy that Neva came in to see her; and a glance at Neva's face was sufficient to convince her that bad news was imminent. "What is it, Neva?" she demanded. "I've felt all the morning that something rotten was on the way. Now, I know it's here. Tell me."
"Do you recall Mrs. Ranier? She was at my place one afternoon——"
"Perfectly," interrupted Narcisse, "Amy Fosdick's sister."