“Ah, it is not my unsupported judgment this time!” said Dick, sublimely ignoring the point of Hugh’s question. “Agnes agrees with me; Mrs. Owen agrees with me.”
“Stop a moment,” said Hugh. “I thought the rules of the Literific sought to ordain, wasn’t it, that the subject of the paper should be secret till the notices were sent out. How did you and Mrs. Owen know? Did Agnes tell you, and you tell Mrs. Owen?”
“Agnes felt it her duty to tell me,” said Dick, looking rather white and stern. “I agreed with her when she told me. I take all responsibility.”
“That’s all right then,” said Hugh. “I can have it out with you, as you are responsible. And I suppose you felt it your duty to tell Mrs. Owen, and Tom and Harry, and the butcher and baker. And am I to understand that you and Agnes and that woman have been talking over the propriety of my wife’s writing this paper for your tin-pot Literific, and the impossibility of having it read, because of its dreadful, improper and disgusting subject? Have you?”
“We have discussed the matter. We had to. Please let me pass, Hugh, I see it is no use talking it over, as I hoped I could, quietly and in a friendly manner with you.”
Hugh did not move.
“I’m blessed if I let you pass,” he said. “You’ve been spending your happy, holy Sunday afternoon—oh, I can imagine the tone so well—about her, and you have chosen to speak of the subject to me, and so I’m going to answer you.”
“There is no need. I see I made a mistake in speaking to you at all,” said Dick.
Hugh had completely lost his usually imperturbable temper, and lost it in the violent, blazing manner with which good-tempered people do on the rare occasions when they lose it at all. As if Edith could write, or wish to write, anything that might not be read or discussed in the Courts of Heaven! And that his sister and this prig, and that woman should have talked over the question together! He easily imagined, too, their mental attitude toward her, the thoughts that prompted and were prompted by what they said. The thought of it all was perfectly intolerable.
“Yes, you made a mistake,” he said, “and you make another in thinking I am not going to answer you. Because I am. You’re too much accustomed to go jawing away in your pulpit to people who can’t answer you. And from not being answered you get to think that you are always quite right. You aren’t, and I’m telling you so. What the deuce do you mean by supposing that my wife could write, if she tried, anything that wasn’t fit to be read and discussed? Why, it’s you who aren’t fit to read and discuss it, any more than you are fit to go and see ‘Tristan.’ That’s by the way; I don’t care what you think or say about me for singing in it, or what you say about the opera. I just laugh. But it’s a different matter when you come to think and say things about Edith. I don’t laugh then—I’m not laughing now. How dare you do it?”