Miss Reed: “Oh, you silly, silly thing!—Really this book makes me sick, Nettie.”
Ransom: “Well, the long and the short of it was, I was hit—hard, and I lost all courage. You know how I am, Grinnidge.”
Miss Reed, softly: “Oh, poor fellow!”
Ransom: “So I let the time go by, and at the end I hadn’t said anything.”
Miss Reed: “No, sir! You hadn’t!” Miss Spaulding gradually ceases to play, and fixes her attention wholly upon Miss Reed, who bends forward over the register with an intensely excited face.
Ransom: “Then something happened that made me glad, for twenty-four hours at least, that I hadn’t spoken. She sent me the money for twenty-five lessons. Imagine how I felt, Grinnidge! What could I suppose but that she had been quietly biding her time, and storing up her resentment for my having told her she couldn’t learn to paint, till she could pay me back with interest in one supreme insult?”
Miss Reed, in a low voice: “Oh, how could you think such a cruel, vulgar thing?” Miss Spaulding leaves the piano, and softly approaches her, where she has sunk on her knees beside the register.
Ransom: “It was tantamount to telling me that she had been amusing herself with me instead of my lessons. It remanded our whole association, which I had got to thinking so romantic, to the relation of teacher and pupil. It was a snub—a heartless, killing snub; and I couldn’t see it in any other light.” Ransom walks away to the window, and looks out.
Miss Reed, flinging herself backward from the register, and hiding her face in her hands: “Oh, it wasn’t! it wasn’t! it wasn’t! How could you think so?”
Miss Spaulding, rushing forward, and catching her friend in her arms: “What is the matter with you, Ethel Reed? What are you doing here, over the register? Are you trying to suffocate yourself? Have you taken leave of your senses?”