“Very good,” she said. “If that is your last word, be it so; I’ve done!”
But “Wait!” he protested feebly. “You are so hasty.”
“Wait?” she retorted. “What for? What is the use? Are you going to do it?”
He fidgeted on his stool.
“I suppose so,” he muttered at last. “Curse you, you won’t listen to what a man says.”
“You are going to do it?”
He nodded.
“Then why not say so at once?” she answered. “There, my lad,” she continued, thrusting the writing things before him, “short and sweet, as nobody knows better how to do it than yourself! Half a dozen lines will do the trick as well as twenty.”
To his credit be it said, he threw down the pen more than once, sickened by the task which she set him. But she chid, she cajoled, she coaxed him; and grimly added the pains she was at to the account of her rival. In the end, after a debate upon time and place, in which he was all for procrastination—feeling as if in some way that salved his conscience—the letter was written and placed in her hands.
Then “What sort is this Thistlewood?” she asked. “A gentleman?”