Again I laugh harshly.
"Ha! ha! if we came to mutual anecdotes, I am not quite sure that I might not have the best of it!"
"That is not the question," he replies, in a voice so exceedingly stern, so absolutely different from any thing I have ever hitherto contemplated as possible in my gentle, genial Roger, that again, to the depths of my soul, I quail; how could I ever, in wildest dreams, have thought I should dare to tell him?—"it is nothing to me what tales you can tell of her!—she is not my wife!—what I wish to know—what I will know, is, whether there is any thing that she could say of you!"
For a moment, I do not answer. I cannot. A coward fear is grasping my heart with its clammy hands. Then—
"Could!" say I, shrugging my shoulders, and feebly trying to laugh derisively; "of course she could! it would be difficult to set a limit to the powers of a lady of her imagination!"
"What do you mean?" he cries, quickly, and with what sounds like a sort of hope in his voice; "have you any reason—any grounds for thinking her inventive?"
I do not answer directly.
"It is true, then," I cry, with flashing eyes, and in a voice of great and indignant anguish. "I have not been mistaken! I was right! Is it possible that you, who, only this morning, warned me with such severity against backbiting, have been calmly listening to scandalous tales about me from a stranger?"
He does not interrupt me: he is listening eagerly, and that sort of hope is still in his face.
"I knew it would come, sooner or later," I continue, speaking excitedly, and with intense bitterness, "sooner or later, I knew that it would be a case of Algy over again! but I did not—did not think that it would have been quite so soon! Great Heaven!" (smiting my hands sharply together, and looking upward), "I have fallen low! to think that I should come to be discussed by you with her!"