When Thursday afternoon arrived, it found Miss Harding entering the ogre’s bedroom with a smile tightly glued on her lips, and a heart beating uncomfortably fast beneath her ugly flannel blouse. From the bed a pair of gimlet-like eyes surveyed her sharply, pale lips twisted, and showed a snarl of teeth. He volunteered no remark, however, and I wasted not a second in opening my book, and beginning to read as a refuge against conversation. I could feel the scrutiny of his eyes on my face, but I read on steadily, never looking up for nearly an hour, when the story came to an end.
“Have you had enough reading for to-day, or would you care to hear one of the articles in this review?”
He glared at me, and said coldly:—
“So you are in the conspiracy, too! Women are all alike! Sitting here, all smiles and flummery to my face, and then going away to abuse me behind my back!”
“That’s not true!”
I cried hotly. “At least, it’s a very unfair representation. There was no necessity for me to come here at all. I have done it because you were a neighbour, and ill, and I wanted to help you—and even more to help your wife. As for ‘smiles and flummery,’ as you express it, there has been no chance of anything so friendly. You have allowed no chance!”
“You don’t deny, I suppose, that you joined with matron in abusing me as a monster of wickedness?”
“I said you had the worst temper I had ever met. So you have. I said I believed that you poisoned yourself, as well as every one near you. So I do. All the more credit to me for giving you so much of my time.”
He lay silent, staring into my face. It was plain that the man had received a shock. For once in his life he had been shown a picture of himself as others saw him, and in the seeing something had been hurt—conscience, vanity, amour-propre—it was impossible to say which, and now his brain was at work, trying to assimilate the new thought. All the time I had been reading, he had been pondering and raging. Probably he had not heard a single word.
“You women,” he began again. “You women! Talk of ministering angels—all very fine for a few days, while the novelty lasts—after that a poor beggar can suffer tortures, and get nothing but revilings for bad temper. Would you be an angel of meekness if you had to go through what I am bearing now?”