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 s.n.a.t.c.hes her handkerchief from her pocket, and buries her face in it.--"Oh, dear--oh, dear! Oh!--hu, hu, hu!"

MISS SPAULDING, relenting: "It was awkward."

MISS REED: "Awkward! You seem to think that because I carry things off lightly I have no feeling."

MISS SPAULDING: "You know I don't think that, Ethel."

MISS REED, pursuing her advantage: "I don't know it from you, Nettie. I've tried and TRIED to pa.s.s it off as a joke, and to treat it as something funny; but I can tell you it's no joke at all."

MISS SPAULDING, sympathetically: "I see, dear."

MISS REED: "It's not that I care for him" -

MISS SPAULDING: "Why, of course."

MISS REED: "For I don't in the least. He is horrid every way: blunt, and rude, and horrid. I never cared for him. But I care for myself! He has put me in the position of having done an unkind thing--an unladylike thing--when I was only doing what I had to do.

Why need he have taken it the way he did? Why couldn't he have said politely that he couldn't accept the money because he hadn't earned it? Even THAT would have been mortifying enough. But he must go and be so violent, and rush off, and--Oh, I never could have treated anybody so!"

MISS SPAULDING: "Not unless you were very fond of them."

MISS REED: "What?"

MISS SPAULDING: "Not unless you were very fond of them."

MISS REED, putting away her handkerchief: "Oh, nonsense, Nettie! He never cared anything for me, or he couldn't have acted so. But no matter for that. He has fixed everything so that it can never be got straight--never in the world. It will just have to remain a hideous ma.s.s of--of--_I_ don't know what; and I have simply got to on withering with despair at the point where I left off. But I don't care! That's one comfort."

MISS SPAULDING: "I don't believe he'll let you wither long, Ethel."

MISS REED: "He's let me wither for twenty-four hours already! But it's nothing to me, now, how long he lets me wither. I'm perfectly satisfied to have the affair remain as it is. I am in the right, and if he comes I shall refuse to see him."

MISS SPAULDING: "Oh, no, you won't, Ethel!"

MISS REED: "Yes, I shall. I shall receive him very coldly. I won't listen to any excuse from him."

MISS SPAULDING: "Oh, yes, you will, Ethel!"

MISS REED: "No, I shall not. If he wishes me to listen he must begin by humbling himself in the dust--yes, the dust, Nettie! I won't take anything short of it. I insist that he shall realize that I have suffered."

MISS SPAULDING: "Perhaps he has suffered too!"

MISS REED: "Oh, HE suffered!"

MISS SPAULDING: "You know that he was perfectly devoted to you."

MISS REED: "He never said so."

MISS SPAULDING: "Perhaps he didn't dare."

MISS REED: "He dared to be very insolent to me."

MISS SPAULDING: "And you know you liked him very much."

MISS REED: "I won't let you say that, Nettie Spaulding. I DIDN'T like him. I respected and admired him; but I didn't LIKE him. He will come near me; but if he does he has to begin by--by--Let me see, what shall I make him begin by doing?" She casts up her eyes for inspiration while she leans forward over the register. "Yes, I will!

He has got to begin by taking that money!"

MISS SPAULDING: "Ethel, you wouldn't put that affront upon a sensitive and high-spirited man!"

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 doc.u.ment 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 part.i.tion 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."

GRINNIDGE: "You can have all you want of it at the market price."