“He's asked her to marry him!”
“Kenby? Mrs. Adding?”
“Yes!”
“Well, now, Isabel, this won't do! They ought to be ashamed of themselves. With that morbid, sensitive boy! It's shocking—”
“Will you listen? Or do you want me to stop?” He arrested himself at her threat, and she resumed, after giving her contempt of his turbulence time to sink in, “She refused him, of course!”
“Oh, all right, then!”
“You take it in such a way that I've a great mind not to tell you anything more about it.”
“I know you have,” he said, stretching himself out again; “but you'll do it, all the same. You'd have been awfully disappointed if I had been calm and collected.”
“She refused him,” she began again, “although she respects him, because she feels that she ought to devote herself to her son. Of course she's very young, still; she was married when she was only nineteen to a man twice her age, and she's not thirty-five yet. I don't think she ever cared much for her husband; and she wants you to find out something about him.”
“I never heard of him. I—”