The Register | Page 6

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!"
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 pass 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 mass 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