“Your wife? Then, good-night! No Christian female would live in these diggings for a week—unless she was an artist’s wife and couldn’t help herself.”
“Why not?” Felix demanded. Though this was just what he himself had been conjecturing about Rose-Ann’s feelings, he found himself resenting this girl’s scornful imputation to her of those same feelings.
“Well, you’ve seen the place,” she said. “Have you noticed any bath-tub? No—the people who live in these places take their baths standing up in that iron sink there in the back. Cold water, fresh from a very cold lake! It’s healthy—Spartan and all that—but no regular wife would stand for it. You’ll see. Bring her over here—I’d like to watch her face when you show her around. I haven’t had a good smile for a long time. Bring her over!”
“I’ll do that,” Felix said grimly. “You wait.”
“Oh, I’ll wait. Here—” to the moving man—“leave that stove alone and take a rest for about five minutes.”
2
Felix had felt in the attitude of this girl artist a challenge to Rose-Ann which he was somehow anxious for her to meet. She might not like this place—but it would not be because she was a bourgeois doll, afraid to bathe standing up in an iron sink. Rose-Ann would see in this place what he saw in it, even if she did want something different....
“I’ve been to one place already,” said Rose-Ann, rising from the steps and coming down to meet him. “It’s—just like all the others.”
“Well,” said Felix, his voice unconsciously defiant, “I’ve found you a place that’s different!”
“Have you really? Where is it?”