“You want I should have my—What do you mean, Mrs. Durgin?”
“I want your rooms.”
“You want my rooms?”
Mrs. Durgin did not answer. She let her steadfast look suffice; and Mrs. Marven went on in a rising flutter: “Why, you can't have my rooms! I don't understand you. I've taken my rooms for the whole of August, and they are mine; and—”
“I have got to have your rooms,” said Mrs. Durgin.
“Very well, then, I won't give them up,” said the lady. “A bargain's a bargain, and I have your agreement—”
“If you're not out of your rooms by two o'clock, your things will be put out; and after dinner to-day you will not eat another bite under my roof.”
Mrs. Durgin went in, and it remained for the company to make what they could of the affair. Mrs. Marven did not wait for the result. She was not a dignified person, but she rose with hauteur and whipped away to her rooms, hers no longer, to make her preparations. She knew at least how to give her going the effect of quitting the place with disdain and abhorrence.
The incident of her expulsion was brutal, but it was clearly meant to be so. It made Westover a little sick, and he would have liked to pity Mrs. Marven more than he could. The ladies said that Mrs. Durgin's behavior was an outrage, and they ought all to resent it by going straight to their own rooms and packing their things and leaving on the same stage with Mrs. Marven. None of them did so, and their talk veered around to something extenuating, if not justifying, Mrs. Durgin's action.
“I suppose,” one of them said, “that she felt more indignant about it because she has been so very good to Mrs. Marven, and her daughter, too. They were both sick on her hands here for a week after they came, first one and then the other, and she looked after them and did for them like a mother.”