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MISS REED: “Wouldn’t I? You wait and SEE, Miss Spaulding! He shall take the money, and he shall sign a receipt for it. I’ll draw up the receipt now, so as to have it ready, and I shall ask him to sign it the very moment he enters this door–the very instant!” She takes a portfolio from the table near her, without rising, and writes: “‘Received from Miss Ethel Reed one hundred and twenty-five dollars, in full, for twenty-five lessons in oil-painting.’ There–when Mr. Oliver Ransom has signed this little document he may begin to talk; not before!” She leans back in her chair with an air of pitiless determination.

MISS SPAULDING: “But, Ethel, you don’t mean to make him take money for the lessons he gave you after he told you you couldn’t learn anything?”

MISS REED, after a moment’s pause: “Yes, I do. This is to punish him. I don’t wish for justice now; I wish for vengeance! At first I would have compromised on the six lessons, or on none at all, if he had behaved nicely; but after what’s happened I shall insist upon paying him for every lesson, so as to make him feel that the whole thing, from first to last, was a purely business transaction on my part. Yes, a PURELY–BUSINESS–TRANSACTION!”

MISS SPAULDING, turning to her music: “Then I’ve got nothing more to say to you, Ethel Reed.”

MISS REED: “I don’t say but what, after he’s taken the money and signed the receipt, I’ll listen to anything else he’s got to say, very willingly.” Miss Spaulding makes no answer, but begins to play with a scientific absorption, feeling her way fitfully through the new piece, while Miss Reed, seated by the register, trifles with the book she has taken from the table.

II.

[The interior of the room of Miss Spaulding and Miss Reed remains in view, while the scene discloses, on the other side of the partition wall in the same house, the bachelor apartment of Mr. Samuel Grinnidge. Mr. Grinnidge in his dressing-gown and slippers, with his pipe in his mouth, has the effect of having just come in; his friend Mr. Oliver Ransom stands at the window, staring out into the November weather.]

GRINNIDGE: “How long have you been waiting here?”

RANSOM: “Ten minutes–ten years. How should I know?”

GRINNIDGE: “Well, I don’t know who else should. Get back to-day?”

RANSOM: “Last night.”

GRINNIDGE: “Well, take off your coat, and pull up to the register, and warm your poor feet.” He puts his hand out over the register. “Confound it! somebody’s got the register open in the next room! You see, one pipe comes up from the furnace and branches into a V just under the floor, and professes to heat both rooms. But it don’t. There was a fellow in there last winter who used to get all my heat. Used to go out and leave his register open, and I’d come in here just before dinner and find this place as cold as a barn. We had a running fight of it all winter. The man who got his register open first in the morning got all the heat for the day, for it never turned the other way when it started in one direction. Used to almost suffocate–warm, muggy days–maintaining my rights. Some piano-pounder in there this winter, it seems. Hear? And she hasn’t lost any time in learning the trick of the register. What kept you so late in the country?”

RANSOM, after an absent-minded pause: “Grinnidge, I wish you would give me some advice.”