“I see what I see,” she retorted smoothly.
“I decline to listen to preposterous, lying, nauseating vulgarity,” Snow growled, his mouth twitching angrily. “Such a hideous idea never entered, or could, any head but yours.”
“I see what I see,” she repeated good-humoredly. She was sorry for Charlie.
“Blow what you see!” Rage, and perhaps a subconscious sick fear, obsessed him, made him forget himself in their torturing grip.
“Use your eyes!” his wife advised him more coldly. And, not unjustly incensed, she finished her own toilet in silence, and went down to the breakfast-room without a glance or a word more.
Dr. Ray saw it next.
The physician was still in Washington. Independent now of her large Chicago practice, she took more and more time each year for the travel and study she loved; and few years passed in which she did not make at least one stay of weeks, if not months, in Washington.
“Do you want pretty Miss Gilbert to marry Sên King-lo?” she asked Miss Julia as they sat one morning at breakfast.
Miss Julia was furious. Her old hands trembled so that she dropped the cup she was lifting. It had been in the Townsends’ possession only goodness and the gods of the South knew how long; and she didn’t give it a look as it crashed in fragments on the floor, nor a glance to the pools of hot coffee staining the breakfast damask and her crisp morning-gown. She didn’t say “Damn,” and she didn’t say “Hell”; but for all that, she answered her friend very much as Sir Charles Snow had answered his wife.
The physician took it in perfect good part. But she stood her ground.