I couldn’t have desired more emphasis, but I just hesitated. “She’s so horrible?”
I saw my colleague scarce knew how to put it. “Really shocking.”
“And about me?”
“About you, miss—since you must have it. It’s beyond everything, for a young lady; and I can’t think wherever she must have picked up—”
“The appalling language she applied to me? I can, then!” I broke in with a laugh that was doubtless significant enough.
It only, in truth, left my friend still more grave. “Well, perhaps I ought to also—since I’ve heard some of it before! Yet I can’t bear it,” the poor woman went on while, with the same movement, she glanced, on my dressing table, at the face of my watch. “But I must go back.”
I kept her, however. “Ah, if you can’t bear it—!”
“How can I stop with her, you mean? Why, just for that: to get her away. Far from this,” she pursued, “far from them—”
“She may be different? She may be free?” I seized her almost with joy. “Then, in spite of yesterday, you believe—”
“In such doings?” Her simple description of them required, in the light of her expression, to be carried no further, and she gave me the whole thing as she had never done. “I believe.”