“I wonder if there ever was a husband who did not love to tease his wife?”
“The divorce courts have records of many such unloving wretches.”
“What I want,” she told me, returning to her wish, “is to have you take it up just where you left off. Tell about your pneumonia, and how Mrs. Blodgett found your journal, but didn’t dare give it to me till the doctor was certain you would recover; and then tell of my sending you flowers and jellies and everything I could think of, by her, to help you get well. How”—
“I should have eaten twice as much and recovered much more quickly if she had only let me know from whom they really came,” I interjected in an aggrieved tone.
“And tell how I wouldn’t listen to that scoundrel till you should have a chance to justify yourself; how, the moment I had read your diary, I wrote and rejected him, and would not see him when he called; how he would not accept his dismissal, but followed me to the country; tell how dreadfully in the way he was that evening, till Mrs. Blodgett and Agnes and I trapped him into a game of whist”—
“You Machiavellis!”
“Tell all about my confession, and how we all spoiled you for those months at My Fancy. Oh, weren’t they lovely, Donald?”
“I thought so then.”
“But not now?”
“A gooseberry is good till you taste a strawberry. There was a good deal too much gooseberry, as I remember.”