“Be so good as to tell me at once.”
Dorothy was silent.
As a matter of fact the people who had been speaking of Amory and Cosimo were Walter Wyron and Laura Beamish, but Dorothy did weakly hope that if things were driven underground they might at least be forgotten.
“Aren’t you going to tell me?” Amory demanded.
“No,” Dorothy mumbled.
“You refuse?”
“Yes,” Dorothy mumbled. And then suddenly she broke out almost passionately—
“I don’t blame you in the very least, Amory, but I do blame Cosimo! I do, and it’s no good saying I don’t. A man’s no right to be always about with a woman, getting her talked about, and doing things for her, and always in and out of her place! I do think he might know better!”
Amory was smiling again now, but not very pleasantly—“Oh!” she said. “So when you said you thought I ought to marry Cosimo, you meant that things had gone so far that I might as well?”
“I didn’t, Amory. I didn’t, I didn’t!” Dorothy cried appealingly. “I really think you do seem to hit it off together somehow. And as for what people say, you say what you think about people, and they’ve a right to do the same, and anyway you can’t stop them, and you can’t expect to have the world to yourself. Why, I thought you were always talking about ‘equal rights.’”