"Dear me!" I rose from my seat. I went to the door. "I had no notion that you were in any way connected with that dreadful creature, or I certainly should not have troubled you. To think that you can be the wife of such a man! Of course it is altogether out of the question that I could knowingly engage a servant who had lived in such a house as this!"
Without waiting for her to summon a servant to escort me to the door, I showed myself out into the street.
I had given her one. But now that I had done it I was not by any means proud of the gift I had bestowed. Indeed, when I got indoors I could have bit and slapped and scratched and pinched myself--and worse. Women are cats. There is no doubt of it. Especially to each other! I know it, to my sorrow, of my own experience. If there was one thing on which I had always prided myself, it was that--at any rate, in that respect, I was not like other women. Whatever else I was, I was not a cat.
And now I had been the cat of all the cats!
And all because of that stupid paragraph in that stupid paper.
When I thought of that pale-faced woman, with her sweet, true mouth, and brown eyes, and of all the trouble she had to bear, and of how I had gone out of my way to add to the bitterness of it all, and to rub it in, I could have banged my head against the wall.
But there! the thing was done. And when a thing is done--especially a thing like that--it is not the least use being sorry. One may as well pretend that one is glad. And, after all, the engagement was announced. And why did they announce it, if they did not want to drive me into a rage?
Poor Tommy! He bade fair to have the most to suffer. After his next examination before the magistrates, they committed him for trial. According to the newspapers, it would take place almost immediately. Things were moving fast. It was time that I should move as well. It was time that I should come to an understanding with my friend the gentleman.
So I wrote to him to come and see me, putting a touch or two into my note which I knew would bring him.
And he came.