Miss Spaulding: “Never! After what’s happened I can never look him in the face again. Oh, how low, and mean, and guilty I feel!”
Miss Reed, with surprise: “Why, how droll! Now I don’t feel the least so.”
Miss Spaulding: “Oh, it’s very different with you. You’re in love with him.”
Miss Reed: “For shame, Nettie! I’m not in love with him.”
Miss Spaulding: “And you can explain and justify it. But I never can justify it to myself, much less to him. Let me go, Ethel! I shall tell Mrs. McKnight that we must change this room instantly. And just after I’d got it so nearly in order! Go down and receive him in the parlor, Ethel. I can’t see him.”
Miss Reed: “Receive him in the parlor! Why, Nettie, dear, you’re crazy! I’m going to accept him: and how can I accept him—with all the consequences—in a public parlor? No, indeed! If you won’t meet him here for a moment, just to oblige me, you can go into the other room. Or, no—you’d be listening to every word through the key-hole, you’re so demoralized!”
Miss Spaulding: “Yes, yes, I deserve your contempt, Ethel.”
Miss Reed, laughing: “You will have to go out for a walk, you poor thing; and I’m not going to have you coming back in five or ten minutes. You have got to stay out a good hour.”
Miss Spaulding, running to get her things from the next room: “Oh, I’ll stay out till midnight!”
Miss Reed, responding to a tap at the door: “Ye-e-s! Come in!—You’re caught, Nettie.”