“Insulting you! What do you mean? Clarence is a gentleman. He is incapable of insulting a woman.”
“Is he? He told me I was a suitable wife for a wretched dwarf with the miserably inadequate intelligence which nature gave him reduced to practically a minus quantity by alcohol! At least, he implied it. He asked me to marry him.”
“I have just left him at the club. He is very upset.”
“I should imagine so.” A soft smile played over Ruth’s face. “I spoke to Clarence. I explained things to him. I lit up Clarence’s little mind like a searchlight.”
Bailey rose, tremulous with just wrath.
“You spoke to him in a way that I can only call outrageous and improper, and—er—outrageous.”
He paced the room with agitated strides. Ruth watched him calmly.
“If the overflowing emotion of a giant soul in torment makes you knock over a table or smash a chair,” she said, “I shall send the bill for repairs to you. You had far better sit down and talk quietly. What is worrying you, Bailey?”
“Is it nothing,” demanded her brother, “that my sister should have spoken to a man as you spoke to Clarence Grayling?”
With an impassioned gesture he sent a flower-vase crashing to the floor.