“Ah, you think so. But you are wrong. You cannot touch pitch without stinking.” Frau Schultz's English was apt to fail her now and then.
“Really, I don't understand at all, Frau Schultz.”
“I will make myself quite plain. You have become too great a friend with Mrs. Stapleton. She is the pitch.”
Felicia stopped short, her eyes watering with wind and indignation.
“If you say such things of my friends, Frau Schultz, I shall go home again.”
“I did not hear,” said Frau Schultz coming closer.
Felicia repeated her observation, with an irritated little patting of her foot.
“Ach!” cried the other impatiently, “I come to talk with you out of motherly kindness, for your own good, and you get angry. It is not polite either, as I am so much older than you. I repeat that Mrs. Stapleton is a bad woman. If you do not like to walk with me, I will walk with myself. But I have done my duty. Are you going to stand, Miss Graves, or will you proceed?”
Felicia, in spite of her indignant resentment of Frau Schultz's tone, hesitated for a moment. She had seen too many sordid squabbles in the pension, in consequence of which women would not speak to each other for a week, and asked each other vicariously to pass the salt, not to feel a wholesome horror at the prospect of finding herself involved in one. Hitherto she had escaped. So she checked her outburst of wrath.
“I shall be happy to go on, Frau Schultz, if you will drop the subject,” she said.