"Celia, Celia!" he cried in despair. "What shall I do? I feel terribly at what I said to her."
"Sh! At what you said to her? Oh yes! Yes, that was cruel. But there is so much else, poor child, that I had forgotten that."
He let his plate of soup stand untasted. "Why—why," he faltered, "didn't she enjoy herself?" And a historian of Venice, whose mind should have been wholly engaged in philosophizing the republic's difficult past, hung abjectly upon the question whether a young girl had or had not had a good time at a ball.
"Yes. Oh, yes! She enjoyed herself—if that's all you require," replied his wife. "Of course she wouldn't have stayed so late if she hadn't enjoyed herself."
"No," he said in a tone which he tried to make leading; but his wife refused to be led by indirect methods. She ate her soup, but in a manner to carry increasing bitterness to Elmore with every spoonful.
"Come, Celia!" he cried at last, "tell me what has happened. You know how wretched this makes me. Tell me it, whatever it is. Of course, I must know it in the end. Are there any new complications?"
"No new complications," said his wife, as if resenting the word. "But you make such a bugbear of the least little matter that there's no encouragement to tell you anything."
"Excuse me," he retorted, "I haven't made a bugbear of this."
"You haven't had the opportunity." This was so grossly unjust that Elmore merely shrugged his shoulders and remained silent. When it finally appeared that he was not going to ask anything more, his wife added: "If you could listen, like any one else, and not interrupt with remarks that distort all one's ideas"—Then, as he persisted in his silence, she relented still further. "Why, of course, as you say, you will have to know it in the end. But I can tell you, to begin with, Owen, that it's nothing you can do anything about, or take hold of in any way. Whatever it is, it's done and over; so it needn't distress you at all."
"Ah, I've known some things done and over that distressed me a great deal," he suggested.