She asked no questions and made no comments.  What he had to tell met with chill silence.  Johnnie’s guileless narrative had made clear to her that Clay had brought Kitty home about midnight, had mixed a drink for her, and had given her his own clothes to replace her wet ones.  Somehow the cattleman’s robe, pajamas, and bedroom slippers obtruded unduly from his friend’s story.  Even the Runt felt this.  He began to perceive himself a helpless medium of wrong impressions.  When he tried to explain he made matters worse.

“I suppose you know that when the manager of your apartment house finds out she’s there he’ll send her packing.”  So Beatrice summed up when she spoke at last.

“No, ma’am, I reckon not.  You see we done told him she is Clay’s sister jes’ got in from the West,” the puncher explained.

“Oh, I see.”  The girl’s lip curled and her clean-cut chin lifted a trifle.  “You don’t seem to have overlooked anything.  No, I don’t think I care to have anything to do with your arrangements.”

“She’s an awful pretty cute little thing,” the puncher added, hoping to modify her judgment.

“Indeed!”

Beatrice turned and walked swiftly into the house.  A pulse of anger was beating in her soft throat.  She felt a sense of outrage.  To Clay Lindsay she had given herself generously in spirit.  She had risked something in introducing him to her friends.  They might have laughed at him for his slight social lapses.  They might have rejected him for his lack of background.  They had done neither.  He was so genuinely a man that he had won his way instantly.  In this City of Bluff, as O. Henry dubs New York, his simplicity had rung true as steel.  Still, she had taken a chance and felt she deserved some recognition of it on his part.  This he had never given.  He had based their friendship on equality simply.  She liked it in him, though her vanity had resented it a little.  But this was different.  She was still young enough, still so little a woman of the world, that she set a rigid standard which she expected her friends to meet.  She had believed in Clay, and now he was failing her.

Pacing up and down her room, little fists clenched, her soul in passionate turmoil, Beatrice went over it all again as she had done through a sleepless night.  She had given him so much, and he had seemed to give her even more.  Hours filled with a keen-edged delight jumped to her memory, hours that had carried her away from the falseness of social fribble to clean, wind-swept, open spaces of the mind.  And after this—­after he had tacitly recognized her claim on him—­he had insulted her before her friends by deserting his guests to go off with this hussy he had been spending weeks to search for.

Now his little henchman had the imbecility to ask her help while this girl was living at Clay Lindsay’s apartment, passing herself off as his sister, and proposing to stay there ostensibly as the housekeeper.  She felt degraded, humiliated, she told herself.  Not for a moment did she admit, perhaps she did not know, that an insane jealousy was flooding her being, that her indignation was based on personal as well as moral grounds.