It was time. Rhoda was in a towering passion. What could Phoebe mean, she demanded with terrible emphasis, by telling such lies as those? Did she suppose that Rhoda was going to believe them? Did Phoebe know what the Bible said about speaking ill of your neighbour? Wasn’t she completely ashamed of herself?
“And I’ll tell you what, Phoebe Latrobe,” concluded Rhoda, “I don’t believe it, and I won’t! I’m not going to believe it,—not if you go down on your knees and swear it! ’Tis all silly, wicked, abominable nonsense!—and you know it!”
“Well, if you won’t believe it, there’s an end,” said Phoebe, quietly. “And I think, if you please, Cousin, we had better go to sleep.”
“Pugh! Sleep if you can, you false-hearted crocodile!” said Rhoda, poetically, in distant imitation of the flowers of rhetoric of her friend Molly. “I shan’t sleep to-night. Not likely!”
Yet Rhoda was asleep the first.
Chapter Nine.
Something alters everything.
“To-night we sit together here,
To-morrow night shall come—ah, where?”
Robert Lord Lytton.