'Since Mrs. Merrett won't come to my room, I'm afraid I must ask you two to leave this; to enable me to speak a few plain truths to her in private.'
'She's only anxious for her husband. Why should you be angry with her on that account? She says that you first saw him on the day on which you first saw Twickenham.'
He shot round at her with quite as savage a look as he had given me.
'Who told you that?'
'She was telling us just before you came.'
'It strikes me she's tarred with the same brush as her scoundrelly husband.'
It did make me wild to hear him! It always does when people say things against James. And especially him!
'How dare you stand there and speak of him like that before my face--when, for all I know, his blood's upon your hands!'
I didn't mean it; not at the time I didn't. I just said it because I was in a rage. But if I had meant it ever so much it couldn't have affected him more. He shrank back from me as if I were some dreadful thing; his jaw dropped open; he stared as if his eyes would start out of his head. It was horrid to see. The young lady came stalking up to me. She spoke that cold and haughty as if I was the dirt under her feet; which perhaps she thought I was.
'Aren't you forgetting yourself, my good woman, in using such language? Or are you, as I thought at first, a little mad?' Having given me one, she gave him one too. 'And pray, Douglas, why should you behave in such an extraordinary fashion merely because this person talks as if she were insane?'