SHE: "And why did you think--hope--perhaps--THAT, Mr. Ransom, may I
ask?"

HE: "If I hadn't, how should I have dared to speak?"

SHE: "Dared? You were obliged to speak! Well, since it's all over,
I don't mind saying that I DID have some slight apprehensions that
something in the way of a declaration might be extorted from you."

HE: "Extorted? Oh!" He makes an impassioned rush toward her.

SHE, keeping the table between them: "No, no."

HE: "Oh, I merely wished to ask why you chose to make me suffer so,
after I had come to the point."

SHE: "Ask it across the table, then." After a moment's reflection,
"I made you suffer--I made you suffer--so that you might have a
realizing sense of what you had made ME suffer."

HE, enraptured by this confession: "Oh, you angel!"

SHE, with tender magnanimity: "No; only a woman--a poor, trusting,
foolish woman!" She permits him to surround the table, with
imaginable results. Then, with her head on his shoulder: "You'll
NEVER let me regret it, will you, darling? You'll never oblige me to
punish you again, dearest, will you? Oh, it hurt ME far worse to SEE
your pain than it did you to--to--feel it!" On the other side of the
partition, Mr. Grinnidge's pipe falls from his lips, parted in
slumber, and shivers to atoms on the register. "Oh!" She flies at