Vesper's quick eye ran over the sheet that he held up. "This is a New York weekly paper. Yes, I know it well. What is there here that concerns you?"
"Look, look here," said Agapit, tapping a column in the paper with an impatient gesture. "Read the nonsense, the drivel, the insanity of the thing—"
"Ah,—'Among the Acadiens, Quaintness Unrivalled, Archaic Forms of Speech, A Dance and a Wedding, The Spirit of Evangeline, Humorous Traits, If You Wish a Good Laugh Go Among Them!'"
"She laughed in print, she screamed in black ink!" exclaimed Agapit. "The silly one,—the witch."
"Who was she,—this lady viper?" asked Vesper, briefly.
"She was a woman—a newspaper woman. She spent a summer among us. She gloomed about the beach with a shawl on her shoulders; a small dog followed her. She laid in bed. She read novels, and then," he continued, with rising voice, "she returned home, she wrote this detestability about us."
"Why need you care?" said Vesper, coolly. "She had to reel off a certain amount of copy. All correspondents have to do so. She only touched up things a little to make lively reading."
"Not touching up, but manufacturing," retorted Agapit, with blazing eyes. "She had nothing to go on, nothing—nothing—nothing. We are just like other people," and he ruffled his coal-black hair with both his hands, and looked at his caller fiercely. "Do you not find us so?"
"Not exactly," said Vesper, so dispassionately and calmly, and with such statuesque repose of manner, that he seemed rather to breathe the words than to form them with his lips.