“That is entirely my affair!” When not hurt or injured Elizabeth is superior, and she added scorn to the tone of her voice, but stopped fooling with the ring, which I know she hated to send back.  “I see you do not appreciate the confidence I am putting in you or the compliment I am paying you by telling you first, and if that is the case I will go.”  She made movement as if to get up, but she had no idea of going, so I didn’t notice it, but kept on swinging my feet, and then I asked her if she had told Miss Susanna, and if she hadn’t she ought to at once, Miss Susanna being closely related and I nothing but a summer boarder.  And I said I hoped she would be married right away, as I would love to be at the wedding, and if she would ask me to be one of the bridesmaids I would be one with pleasure.  But she wouldn’t answer me.  Seeing she still had something to say, and wouldn’t leave until she said it, I put my feet back in bed and lay flat with my hands under my head and my eyes shut, and when at last I was fixed and quiet she began for a third time.

I don’t remember a thing after that except a sort of monotone voice and something about people talking about me because I had accepted Whythe’s attentions when everybody knew—­I didn’t hear what everybody knew, and not until I did hear a sound at the door did I wake up good, and then I jumped as if shot and asked her, half-asleep, if she were going to live with Mother and Sister and Sister Edwina and Miss Lily Lou when she was married, but she answered not.  And since her midnight confession she hath not opened her mouth unto me and her little lips get together when she sees me coming, and from her friends I have learned that she is deeply distressed at my treatment of her.  And to her friends I have said Rats! and so endeth the efforts at friendship which she imagined she had made.  I am never going to pretend to be friends with a person who is not truthful, and whom I understand as I understand Elizabeth Hamilton Carter.  I don’t like her, and though it is not necessary to say so unless occasion requires, neither is it necessary to appear to be what I am not.  I like Whythe, and when I saw him a few days after Elizabeth gave herself the satisfaction of communicating to me the return of his tempted affections, I shook hands with him good and hard and wished him all the happiness I knew there was little chance of his getting.  If I were a man and had to live in the house with a female who shut her mouth tight every time she got mad and was continually hurt and always sensitive, there would likely be in that house battle, murder, or sudden death.  Any kind of outspokenness is better to be endured than silent offense.

CHAPTER XXV

This is the last day of August, and it is a day Twickenham Town is going to remember for a long time.  I have done again that which I should not have done, and I guess I had better go home.  I had expected to stay until the twenty-seventh of September and return with Father, who was to spend a week here with me, but he can’t come.