"Oh, Lottie, he loves you so!"
"I don't know," protested Lottie. "He has been so wicked."
Eugenia was looking down upon her with dismayed eyes.
"Don't you love him, Lottie?" she asked.
For a moment the other did not reply. Her lips trembled and her knees were shaking beneath the eiderdown quilt. Then with a slow turn of the head she looked up doggedly. "I believe I hate him," she answered.
A swift flush rose to Eugenia's face, her eyes flashed angrily, she took a step forward. "And you are his wife!" she cried.
But Lottie had turned at last. She flung the quilt aside and rose to her feet, her girlish figure quivering in its beribboned wrapper. There were bright pink spots in her cheeks.
"Yes, I am his wife, God help me," she said.
Eugenia had drawn back before the childish desperation. Lottie had never revolted before—she had thought Eugenia's thoughts and weakly lived up to Eugenia's conception of her duty. She had been meek and amiable and ineffectual; but it came to Eugenia with a shock that she had never admired her until to-day—until the hour of her rebellion.
She spoke sternly—as she might have spoken to herself in a moment of dear, but dismal failure.