She talked for an hour, having got between me and the door, and she
scolded Jim and Bella thoroughly. But they did not hear it, being
occupied with each other, sitting side by side meekly on the divan with
Jim holding Bella's hand under a cushion. She said they would have to be
very good to make up for all the deception, but it was perfectly
clear that it was a relief to her to find that I didn't belong to her
permanently, and as I have said before, she was crazy about Bella.
I sat back in a chair and grew comfortably drowsy in the monotony of her
voice. It was a name that brought me to myself with a jerk.
"Mr. Harbison!" Aunt Selina was saying. "Then bring him down at once,
James. I want no more deception. There is no use cleaning a house and
leaving a dirty corner."
"It will not be necessary for me to stay and see it swept," I said,
mustering the rags she had left of my self-respect, and trying to pass
her. But she planted herself squarely before me.
"You can not stir up a dust like this, young woman, and leave other
people to sneeze in it," she said grimly. And I stayed.
I sat, very small, on a chair in a corner. I felt like Jezebel, or
whatever her name was, and now the Harbison man was coming, and he
was going to see me stripped of my pretensions to domesticity and of a
husband who neglected me. He was going to see me branded a living lie,
and he would hate me because I had put him in a ridiculous position. He
was just the sort to resent being ridiculous.
Jim brought him down in a dressing gown and a state of bewilderment.
It was plain that the memory of the afternoon still rankled, for he was
very short with Jim and inclined to resent the whole thing. The clock
in the hall chimed half after three as they came down the stairs, and I
heard Mr. Harbison stumble over something in the darkness and say that
if it was a joke, he wasn't in the humor for it. To which Jim retorted
that it wasn't anything resembling a joke, and for heaven's sake not to
walk on his feet; he couldn't get around the furniture any faster.
At the door of the den Mr. Harbison stopped, blinking in the light.
Then, when he saw us, he tried to back himself and his dishabille out
into the obscurity of the library. But Aunt Selina was too quick for
him.
"Come in," she called, "I want you, young man. It seems that there are
only two fools in the house, and you are one."