"Yes, and when you talked things over. I heard enough to know that you'd better use the brains the Lord gave you to manage your own affairs. Why don't you put it up to that girl of yours that she can take you or leave you?"
"Really, Hephzibah—"
"Oh, it's all right for you to come along and pry into my business, and tell me what I'm to do. But when I turn the tables you squirm. Funny what a difference it makes whose foot the shoe's on."
Forbes subsided. Under his feeling of bewilderment was a vague suspicion that perhaps there was something in Hephzibah's point of view.
"In the first place," continued this intrepid young woman, "she showed she was no good when she throwed you down like she did. She was going to marry you, wasn't she? And if she cared enough about you for that, it was up to her to stand by you when trouble came. Pretty kind of wife she'd have made if she turned her back the minute hard luck struck you."
Forbes remembered vaguely that Miss Kent had once said something similar. He wondered that two human beings so unlike should have the same view-point.
"You got off easy," Hephzibah continued. "You might have married her. When she showed herself up for what she was, you'd ought to have got down on your marrow-bones and thanked the Lord. But look at you! Instead, you keep on telling her how much you love her and that a yellow streak don't matter—in a woman."
Forbes suddenly realized that he could endure no more. He could not listen longer to these preposterous statements. But underneath his panic of anger, something whispered that he shrank from listening longer to Hephzibah's frantic speech, not because she was uttering slanders against Julia, but because what she said was true.
He struck the arm of his chair with his clenched fist. "Stop!" he said in a voice unlike his own. "I won't listen."
"All right," said Hephzibah Diggs. "But what's sauce for the goose—"