“Where is she now?”
“She had the misfortune to fall in the river. She is upstairs.” And, seeing the light of unbelief in Joe's eyes: “If you care to make a tour of investigation, you will find that I am entirely truthful. In the laundry a maid—”
“She is engaged to me”—doggedly. “Everybody in the neighborhood knows it; and yet you bring her out here for a picnic! It's—it's damned rotten treatment.”
His fist had unclenched. Before K. Le Moyne's eyes his own fell. He felt suddenly young and futile; his just rage turned to blustering in his ears.
“Now, be honest with yourself. Is there really an engagement?”
“Yes,” doggedly.
“Even in that case, isn't it rather arrogant to say that—that the young lady in question can accept no ordinary friendly attentions from another man?”
Utter astonishment left Joe almost speechless. The Street, of course, regarded an engagement as a setting aside of the affianced couple, an isolation of two, than which marriage itself was not more a solitude a deux. After a moment:—
“I don't know where you came from,” he said, “but around here decent men cut out when a girl's engaged.”
“I see!”