Miss Reed: in a pathetic wail: “O Henrietta! do you abandon me thus? Well, I will tell you, heartless girl! I’ve only kept it back till now because it was so extremely mortifying to my pride as an artist—as a student of oil. Will you hear me?”
Miss Spaulding, beginning to play: “No.”
Miss Reed, with burlesque wildness: “You shall!” Miss Spaulding involuntarily desists. “There was a moment—a fatal moment—when he said he thought he ought to tell me that if I found oil amusing I could go on; but that he didn’t believe I should ever learn to use it, and he couldn’t let me take lessons from him with the expectation that I should. There!”
Miss Spaulding, with awful reproach: “And you call that less than nothing? I’ve almost a mind never to speak to you again, Ethel. How could you deceive me so?”
Miss Reed: “Was it really deceiving? I shouldn’t call it so. And I needed your sympathy so much, and I knew I shouldn’t get it unless you thought I was altogether in the right.”
Miss Spaulding: “You are altogether in the wrong! And it’s you that ought to apologize to him—on your bended knees. How could you offer him money after that? I wonder at you, Ethel!”
Miss Reed: “Why—don’t you see, Nettie?—I did keep on taking the lessons of him. I did find oil amusing—or the oilist—and I kept on. Of course I had to, off there in a farmhouse full of lady boarders, and he the only gentleman short of Crawford’s. Strike, but hear me, Henrietta Spaulding! What was I to do about the half-dozen lessons I had taken before he told me I should never learn to use oil? Was I to offer to pay him for these, and not for the rest; or was I to treat the whole series as gratuitous? I used to lie awake thinking about it. I’ve got little tact, but I couldn’t find any way out of the trouble. It was a box—yes, a box of the deepest dye! And the whole affair having got to be—something else, don’t you know?—made it all the worse. And if he’d only—only—But he didn’t. Not a syllable, not a breath! And there I was. I had to offer him the money. And it’s almost killed me—the way he took my offering it, and now the way you take it! And it’s all of a piece.” Miss Reed suddenly snatches her handkerchief from her pocket, and buries her face in it.—“Oh, dear—oh, dear! Oh!—hu, hu, hu!”
Miss Spaulding, relenting: “It was awkward.”
Miss Reed: “Awkward! You seem to think that because I carry things off lightly I have no feeling.”
Miss Spaulding: “You know I don’t think that, Ethel.”