“OF THE WEAK MY HEART IS WEAKEST.”
“You had better send cards to Mrs. Crowther, Isola,” said Martin Disney, two days afterwards, when his wife was sitting at her Davenport writing her family letters.
“Cards! Oh, Martin, she would think that so very formal. I can call upon her. She is always at home on Thursday afternoons, and she likes me to go.”
“I am sorry for that, since I had rather you should never enter her house again.”
“Martin!”
“I have nothing to say against Mrs. Crowther, my dear Isola. But the man is more detestable than I could have believed low birth and unlimited money could make any man. Guileless and inexperienced as you are, I think you must have felt that his manner to you the other night was familiar to the point of being insulting.”
Isola had felt both embarrassed and distressed by her host’s attentions—the insinuating inflections of his fat, pompous voice; his air of being upon a confidential footing with her. It had seemed to her on that evening as if for the first time in her life, before the eyes of men and women, she drank the cup of shame. She had said no word to her husband of Mr. Crowther’s oppressive familiarity, and she had fondly hoped that the matter had escaped his notice.
She sat before him now, flushed and agitated, with lowered eyelids, and one hand restlessly moving about the papers on her blotting-pad.