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."