“I am afraid of myself!” she whispered pantingly. “I am afraid of myself! Must I, then, despise him utterly? What right has he to charge upon me as shame what others account as honor? Can it be that he is conscious of being small and fears to let me grow?”
By different roads, the refined woman, who loved her art for its own sake and reverenced it for the good it might do, and the pretender, tolerated by true artists out of charity, and out of respect for the active benevolence that redeemed her from the rank of a public nuisance—had arrived at a like conclusion.
Barton, after his bath and toilet, sat down to dinner, and scarcely spoke until excellent clear soup and the delicious creamed lobster prepared by Agnes’ own hands, had paved the way for more substantial viands. Then his righteous wrath was partially cooled by perception of the truth that the still, pale woman opposite meant to enter no defense against the aspersions cast upon her in another’s hearing. Nay, more, she made no attempt to cheat him into a milder mood, broached no prudent topics, attempted no diversion. Second thought found fresh fuel for displeasure in her reticence. The double offense of Miss Marvel’s tirade and the airy publisher’s errand were not condonable by discreet silence.
He slashed simultaneously into a roast of beef and the grievance upon his mind.
“I met your particular crony, Miss Marvel, in the car on my way uptown. She was, if possible, more detestably impertinent than usual.”
Agnes beckoned to the waitress and gave her in a low tone an errand to the kitchen. Glancing up at her husband, she saw that he had laid down the carver and was gazing sternly at herself.
“May I, as the least important member of this household, inquire why you sent that girl out of the room? I may be, as your dear friends assert, a small man married to a great woman, but I am credited by others with a modicum of common sense and discretion. I am willing to abide by the consequences of whatever I say at my own table and in the presence of my servants, if I have any proprietorship in either.”
Red heat he had never seen before in Agnes’ face suffused it now, her eyes dilated and gleamed.
“I sent the girl from the room because she was recommended to me by the matron of an orphan asylum in which she was brought up. Miss Marvel is a manager of the institution and had the girl trained in a school for domestics. Mary is much attached to her. I thought it hardly safe or kind to discuss her in Mary’s presence.”
Barton met generous heat with deadly coldness.