"I am very glad you did not carry out your intention then," retorted Mrs. Mortomley; "for I should not have taken the present."
Mrs. Werner laughed.
"I do not mean to buy it for you, Dolly," she remarked; "but I shall give it to you nevertheless."
"I will not have it," her friend repeated. "I will take nothing from you now, save love and kisses."
"Why, my dear?" asked Mrs. Werner. "In the old days Dolly Gerace would have accepted anything Leonora Trebasson offered her as freely as Leonora Trebasson would have taken Dolly's gift, small or large. What has come between us? What have I done, Dolly, that you should now shut the doors of your heart against me?"
"I have not shut the doors of my heart against you, Lenny, and you are wicked to say anything of the kind," was the reply. "But it is no longer you and me—it is no longer you and me, and your mother and my aunt, but—"
"Finish your sentence, dear," said Mrs. Werner, as Dolly paused, unwilling, in the presence of a man's wife, to terminate her utterance with an ungracious reference to the absent husband.
"There is no necessity," answered Mrs. Mortomley; "you know what I mean as well as I do myself."
"Let me see if you are right," was the reply, spoken almost caressingly. "You would take anything from me, but you will have nothing from my husband—belonging to or coming from him—directly or indirectly; is not that your standpoint, Dolly?"
"Yes," Dolly answered. "I hate to seem ungracious, but I could receive nothing from your hands, knowing you were but the filter through which—"