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MISS SPAULDING: “Yes, I think he was wrong. And the terms of his refusal were very ungentlemanly. He ought to apologize most amply and humbly.” At a certain expression in Miss Reed’s face, she adds, with severity: “Unless you’re keeping back the main point. You usually do. Are you?”

MISS REED: “No, no. I’ve told you everything–everything!”

MISS SPAULDING: “Then I say, as I said from the beginning, that he behaved very badly. It was very awkward and very painful, but you’ve really nothing to blame yourself for.”

MISS REED, ruefully: “No-o-o!”

MISS SPAULDING: “What do you mean by that sort of ‘No’?”

MISS REED: “Nothing.”

MISS SPAULDING, sternly: “Yes, you do, Ethel.”

MISS REED: “I don’t, really. What makes you’ think I do?”

MISS SPAULDING: “It sounded very dishonest.”

MISS REED: “Did it? I didn’t mean it to.” Her friend breaks down with a laugh, while Miss Reed preserves a demure countenance.

MISS SPAULDING: “What ARE you keeping back?”

MISS REED: “Nothing at all–less than nothing! I never thought it was worth mentioning.”

MISS SPAULDING: “Are you telling me the truth?”

MISS REED: “I’m telling you the truth and something more. You can’t ask better than that, can you?”

MISS SPAULDING, turning to her music again: “Certainly not.”

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!”