She asked this in the insulting "point of the bayonet" tone which angry equals use to one another the world over.
Either question or tone would have been enough to have put George's already sensitive nerves on edge. Both together were unbearable. It was, when you came down to it, the most awkward question in the world.
Why, indeed, had he fired Betty Sheridan? He hadn't really given himself an account of the inward reasons yet. The episode had been too disturbing; and it was George's characteristic to put off looking on unpleasant facts as long as possible. Had he been really hard up, which he never had been, he would undoubtedly have put away, unopened, the bills he couldn't pay. Life was already presenting him with the bill of yesterday's ill humor, and he was not yet ready to add up the amount. He hid himself now behind the austerity of the offended husband.
"My dear," he inquired in his turn, "don't you think that you had best leave the details of my office to me?"
He knew how lame this was, and how inadequate, before Genevieve replied.
"Betty Sheridan is not a detail of your office. She's one of my best friends, and I want to know why you fired her. I dare say she was exasperating; but I can't see any reason why you should have done it. You should have let her leave."
It was Betty, with that lamentable lack of delicacy which George had pointed out to her, who had not been ready to leave.
"You will have to let me be the judge of what I should or should not have done," said George. This piece of advice Genevieve ignored.
"Why did you send her away?" she demanded.
"I sent her away, if you want to know, for her insolence and her damned bad taste. If you think—working in my office as she was—it's decent or proper on her part to be active in a campaign that is against me——"