"I know nothing. I want to know nothing. I will know nothing. But with you, who are always talking, it is different."
"Hetty, if you don't tell me what you mean, I--I--I'll throw my shoe at you."
"Throw away. You never hit anything you aimed at yet." She went on calmly brushing her hair, as if she had not made me all over pins and needles. Presently she gave utterance to an observation which was Sphinx-like in its mystery: "A Frenchman thinks no more of breaking an Englishwoman's heart than--than of eating his breakfast."
"Hetty! what do you mean?"
"Ask Monsieur Doumer."
Monsieur Doumer! Ask Monsieur Doumer! Why, M. Doumer was our French master, as unromantic-looking an example of the one sex as Miss Frazer was of the other. He was immensely stout, perfectly bald-headed, with cheeks and skin which looked as if they were covered with iron-mould, because he never shaved them. That anything feminine could regard with equanimity the prospect of being brought within measurable distance of that scrubby countenance did seem incredible. And yet here was Hetty hinting.
"Do you mean to say that Miss Frazer's in love with M. Doumer?"
"You say yourself that she seems to be going mad."
"Yes; but I don't quite see what that has to do with it."
"Not when a woman's being trampled on?"