"Archie!"
"Oh, yes, that shocks you—such a fine lady as you are," He seemed to be working himself up, like a woman in hysterics. "So grandly indifferent to money, too!—just so's you've got enough of it. Who spent the money, anyway?—tell me that! Was it me, who haven't bought myself so much as a new pair of pants in three years?"
She stared at him, mutely. "So this," she thought, "is the real man!" His ears, his great, coarse hands—they meant something after all.
Her white look drove him into a further frenzy. "Oh, yes, glare at me, if I'm good enough for you to glare at!—Let me tell you something—if it's on my account you're staying, you needn't. That's all! It's a wife a man wants at a time like this, not any marble image, not any tragedy-queen! Not any noble character that watches him out of the corner of her eye, and if he's real good—pats him on the hand! I've had enough of that!—Go on with your friend Nikolai," he cried violently. "Try him out for six months or a year, and if he suits, and you don't want to come back here—by God, you needn't!"
"Archie," she said, trembling in every limb, "I shall leave your house to-morrow."
"Good!" he cried. "Good! And I'm going to beat you to it!"
He strode to the kitchen door and flung it wide. "Come here, Ellen Neal, and bear witness that I'm leaving this house first."
The front door banged behind him....
The two women stared at each other.
"Was that—was that Mr. Archie?"