"I didn't mean you!" Susan answered angrily. Then with sudden calm and sweetness, she resumed, busily tearing up and assorting old letters the while, "But now you're trying to make me mad, Billy, and you don't care what you say. The trouble with you," she went on, with sisterly kindness and frankness, "is that you think you are the only person who really ought to get on in the world. You know so much, and study so hard, that you DESERVE to be rich, so that you can pension off every old stupid German laborer at the works who still wants a job when they can get a boy of ten to do his work better than he can! You mope away over there at those cottages, Bill, until you think the only important thing in the world is the price of sausages in proportion to wages. And for all that you pretend to despise people who use decent English, and don't think a bath-tub is a place to store potatoes; I notice that you are pretty anxious to study languages and hear good music and keep up in your reading, yourself! And if that's not cultivation---"
"I never said a word about cultivation!" Billy, who had been apparently deep in his book, looked up to snap angrily. Any allusion to his efforts at self-improvement always touched him in a very sensitive place.
"Why, you did TOO! You said---"
"Oh, I did not! If you're going to talk so much, Sue, you ought to have some faint idea what you're talking about!"
"Very well," Susan said loftily, "if you can't address me like a gentleman, we won't discuss it. I'm not anxious for your opinion, anyway."
A silence. Mr. Oliver read with passionate attention. Susan sighed, sorted her letters, sighed again.
"Billy, do you love me?" she asked winningly, after a pause.
Another silence. Mr. Oliver turned a page.
"Are you sure you've read every word on that page, Bill,--every little word?"
Silence again.