Again his resentment promised to leap beyond control. He clenched his hands and stared with contracted eyes at the floor.
“Well,” he articulated finally, “we're promised anyhow; that can't be denied. I have your word.”
“Yes,” she admitted, “but chance that I went with Phebe doesn't mean I'd never come back.”
“It would mean that you'd never come back,” he paraphrased her.
“Maybe I would know better,” she answered quickly. “I'm sorry, Calvin. I didn't go to be so sharp. Only I don't know what's right,” she went on unhappily.
“It isn't what's right,” he corrected her, “but what you want. I wish Phebe had stayed away a little longer.”
“There you go again at Phebe!” she protested.
He replied grimly; “Not half what I feel.”
In a dangerously calm voice she inquired, “What's the rest then?”
“She's a trouble-maker,” he asserted in a shaking tone over which he seemed to have no command; “she came back to Greenstream and for no reason but her own slinked into our happiness. Your whole family—even Hosmer, pretending to be so wise—are blind as bats. You can't even see that Phebe's hair is as dyed as her stories. She says she is on the stage, but it's a pretty stage! I've been to Stanwick and seen those Parisian Dainties and burlesque shows. They're nothing but a lot of half-naked women cavorting and singing fast songs. And the show only begins—with most of them—when the curtain drops. If I even try to think of you in that I get sick.”