"Matilda needn't try to stuff such nonsense down our throats. She cannot make me believe but that she concocted the whole thing herself."
Mrs. Montgomery was evidently aroused. Her sallow face assumed a deeper color, and her eyes spoke out the honest convictions of her thoughts.
"Poor Evelyn, indeed! She is just as much sick as I am at present. How they can trump up such things and make people believe them is more than I can see."
Mrs. Montgomery plied her knitting needles with almost lightning rapidity, and the exercise seemed to give relief to the angry feeling that accompanied it.
"You need not say a word in Matilda's defence, William. I pity Stephen Verne from the bottom of my heart. It is always such men that become martyrs to the whims and tyrannical grievances of their wives."
Mrs. Montgomery stooped to pickup the ball of yarn that had rolled under her chair, and her husband went towards the door as if to depart.
"I tell you what it is, William, Matilda Verne is my own sister, but it grieves me to think so. Talk of pride or dignity. She has none. Pride—yes, a nice kind of pride that lives on lies and falsities of every description! But she cannot deceive me, thank Heaven; I can read her through and through."
"In some instances, my dear, your boasted accomplishment is not always of the most agreeable kind," said Mr. Montgomery, in his bland, easy manner.
"Never mind that part of it. I can bear it, since it gives the preciousness of seeing people as they are, their shallowness and their shams. Is there anything genuine in this every-day world? Really, each day I see something to disgust me."
The speaker's face gave proof to her speech as she fixed upon her husband a long, earnest look.