We were at the foot of the stairs. The other men and women had collected nearer the door.
"Condolences! Why, yesterday you told me congratulations were the order of the day!" he answered in a tone of good-natured raillery.
"They are so no longer," I answered, gloomily. "My head is simply splitting too. I can't think where I get these confounded headaches," I muttered, pushing the hair up off my forehead, and wishing I could push off some of the oppressing ideas. "Are you coming with me, Dick?"
He looked at me attentively, and possibly seeing the excitement I tried to suppress, and the flush it drove to my face, he debated my sobriety. I think he came to the right conclusion, for the next moment he said,—
"Yes; I'll come. Just let me get my over coat and tell the coachman."
I had the same thing to do, and we met a second or two later at the bottom of the steps, and turned to walk towards my place. As we walked down the street he slipped his arm in mine and said,—
"You seem frightfully upset. What has happened?"
"That's just what I want to know!" I answered. "If I knew I should not so much mind, but this is what I hate about women, they never will speak out nor come to the point. It is the one great fault of the sex. I despise it utterly. It can do no good, and it is most annoying and irritating to a person who has a right to confidence."
"My dear fellow," he said, soothingly, "you can't expect your fiancee, if that's what you mean, to be so uncommonly direct in speech as you are! You have a way of very much going to the point in everything, but you won't find it in other people, even throwing women out of the question."
"What is the use of wrapping things up in mystery? But women delight in it! The more they can mystify and mislead and perplex you, and leave their real or their possible meaning doubtful and involved, the greater the pleasure they have. They will carry on a conversation for hours by hints, suggestions, ambiguous terms, allusions, phrases that may mean anything or nothing, and then leave at the end, in obscurity, the whole matter, which could have been explained and made perfectly clear and settled on a satisfactory basis in a few short sentences. It's a petty, abominable trait in their character."