“Which? The bagmen or the humming-birds?”
“I won’t speak to you any more. You purposely misunderstand me to insult me, that you may go off to your Maggie Finches.”
“There is only one, dear.”
“And so much the worse. You focus, you concentrate, on that wretched object the admiration, the love, of which I am bereaved. If you go gallivanting and meandering round dressmakers’ assistants, I can do the same. I will not be left out in the cold for any Maggie Finches, I can tell you. There are plenty of bagmen, as you call them—commercials is their proper designation—who would be only too glad, too proud, to lick the dust off my feet.”
“My dear, you are hot.”
“I have occasion to be hot.”
“And my tea is cold.”
“This is an outrage!”
Mrs. Birdwood rose and flounced out of the room. She rushed upstairs, casting at the slavey, en passant, a notice to quit, for no particular reason, but as a vent to her wrath; and she dashed into the bedroom, where nothing had as yet been put in order, and threw herself in the arm-chair and burst into a flood of tears. She remained for some time crying and fanning herself into a greater flame of wrath. Then she rose and went to the window. She saw her husband—he had taken off his coat, and he was digging in the garden. He had told her, the previous evening, that he expected hard frost, and would turn up the mould, that the slugs might be killed. Actually, after that scene, after those reproaches hurled at him, after that exposure, he was placidly digging, that the frost might kill the slugs.
Really the man was unendurable.