"You may be much mistaken, Roger."
"True. I have been mistaken more than once in my life. I am not mistaken this time, though."
"I presume you would have gone if I hadn't been with you?"
"Certainly, if she had asked me, which is not very likely."
"And you lay the disappointment of missing a glimpse into the sweet privacy of such a home to my charge?"
It was a spiteful speech; and Roger's silence made me feel it was, which, with the rather patronizing opinion I had of Roger, I found not a little galling. So I, too, kept silence, and nothing beyond a platitude had passed between us when I found myself at my own door, my shopping utterly forgotten, and something acid on my mind.
"Don't you mean to come in?" I said, for he held out his hand at the top of the stairs to bid me good-night. "My husband will be home soon, if he has not come already. You needn't be bored with my company—you can sit in the study."
"I think I had better not," he answered.
"I am very sorry, Roger, if I was rude to you," I said; "but how could you wish me to be hand-and-glove with a woman who visits people who she is well aware would not think of inviting her if they had a notion of her surroundings. That can't be right, I am certain. I protest I feel just as if I had been reading an ill-invented story,—an unnatural fiction. I cannot get these things together in my mind at all, do what I will."
"There must be some way of accounting for it," said Roger.