Miss Reed: “Oh, how generous! how noble!”
Ransom: “I had had a thousand opportunities, and I hadn’t been man enough to tell her that I was in love with her.”
Miss Reed: “How can he say it right out so bluntly? But if it’s true”—
Ransom: “I couldn’t speak. I was afraid of putting an end to the affair—of frightening her—disgusting her.”
Miss Reed: “Oh, how little they know us, Nettie!”
Ransom: “She seemed so much above me in every way—so sensitive, so refined, so gentle, so good, so angelic!”
Miss Reed: “There! Now do you call it eavesdropping? If listeners never hear any good of themselves, what do you say to that? It proves that I haven’t been listening.”
Miss Spaulding: “’Sh! They’re saying something else.”
Ransom: “But all that’s neither here nor there. I can see now that under the circumstances she couldn’t as a lady have acted otherwise than she did. She was forced to treat our whole acquaintance as a business matter, and I had forced her to do it.”
Miss Reed: “You had, you poor thing!”