“I’m very much afraid it is.”
“Oh, that would be too awful! Don’t let it be Maud and Helen!”
“If I could help it, I would,” he replied, bracing himself for confession. “I’m sure it is your friends. In fact, Tom Harmon told me they were coming.”
“You knew it all the time?”
“I did.”
“And let me come here without a word of warning?” The girl’s tone rasped Remsen’s accusing conscience. She spoke like a hurt child whose trust has been betrayed.
Remsen waited until the chauffeur, who had jumped out and was on his way to the scene of distress, was beyond hearing. Then he said: “Please don’t think me wholly selfish. But how was I to know that the presence of other couples—I mean other people—would be so distressing to you?”
“Don’t pretend to be stupid,” she rebuked him. “There I was, a bride without any bridegroom, looking for a place to hide myself and you let me run right into the very people of all in the world that I didn’t want to see. You knew I didn’t want to see them. I told you so,” she ended with a suggestion of fearfulness, “the first thing. On the train.”
“Before you had a husband,” he reminded her. “Now you have one—”
“And that makes it worse! A thousand times worse. Oh, why didn’t you tell me on the train?”