MISS REED: "'Sh! Listen."
MISS SPAULDING: "I won't listen! It's shameful: it's wicked! Idon't see how you can do it, Ethel!" She remains, however, kneeling near the register, and she involuntarily inclines a little more toward it.
RANSOM: "--It isn't a thing that I care to shout from the house-tops." He returns from the window to the chimney-piece."I wrote the rudest kind of note, and sent back her letter and her money in it.She had said that she hoped our acquaintance was not to end with the summer, but that we might sometimes meet in Boston; and Ianswered that our acquaintance had ended already, and that I should be sorry to meet her anywhere again."GRINNIDGE: "Well, if you wanted to make an ass of yourself, you did it pretty completely."MISS REED, whispering: "How witty he is! Those men are always so humorous with each other."RANSOM: "Yes; I didn't do it by halves."MISS REED, whispering: "Oh, THAT'S funny, too!"GRINNIDGE: "It didn't occur to you that she might feel bound to pay you for the first half-dozen, and was embarrassed how to offer to pay for them alone?"MISS REED: "How he DOES go to the heart of the matter!" She presses Miss Spaulding's hand in an ecstasy of approval.
RANSOM: "Yes, it did--afterward."
MISS REED, in a tender murmur: "Oh, POOR Oliver!"RANSOM: "And it occurred to me that she was perfectly right in the whole affair."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!"
GRINNIDGE: "Well, what do you intend to do about it?"RANSOM: "Well" -
MISS REED: "'Sh!"
MISS SPAULDING: "'Sh!"
RANSOM: "--that's what I want to submit to you, Grinnidge.I must see her."GRINNIDGE: "Yes.I'm glad _I_ mustn't."MISS REED, stifling a laugh on Miss Spaulding's shoulder: "They're actually AFRAID of us, Nettie!"RANSOM: "See her, and go down in the dust."MISS REED: "My very words!"
RANSOM: "I have been trying to think what was the very humblest pie I could eat, by way of penance; and it appears to me that I had better begin by saying that I have come to ask her for the money Irefused."
MISS REED, enraptured: "Oh! doesn't it seem just like--like--inspiration, Nettie?"
MISS SPAULDING: "'Sh! Be quiet, do! You'll frighten them away!"GRINNIDGE: "And then what?"
RANSOM: "What then? I don't know what then.But it appears to me that, as a gentleman, I've got nothing to do with the result.All that I've got to do is to submit to my fate, whatever it is."MISS REED, breathlessly: "What princely courage! What delicate magnanimity! Oh, he needn't have the LEAST fear! If I could only tell him that!"GRINNIDGE, after an interval of meditative smoking: "Yes, I guess that's the best thing you can do.It will strike her fancy, if she's an imaginative girl, and she'll think you a fine fellow."MISS REED: "Oh, the horrid thing!"
GRINNIDGE: "If you humble yourself to a woman at all, do it thoroughly.If you go halfway down she'll be tempted to push you the rest of the way.If you flatten out at her feet to begin with, ten to one but she will pick you up."RANSOM: "Yes, that was my idea."
MISS REED: "Oh, was it, indeed! Well!"
