got a right to live, some time in her life, I guess!  Things were just beginning to look brighter—­we’d moved up here, and that frozen crowd across the street were after Jim for their daughter, and they’d have started us with the right people—­and then I saw how Edith was getting him away from me.  She did it, too!  She got him!  A girl with money can do that to a married woman—­yes, she can, every time!  And what could I do?  What can any woman do in my fix?  I couldn’t do anything but try to stand it—­and I couldn’t stand it!  I went to that icicle—­that Vertrees girl—­and she could have helped me a little, and it wouldn’t have hurt her.  It wouldn’t have done her any harm to help me that little!  She treated me as if I’d been dirt that she wouldn’t even take the trouble to sweep out of her house!  Let her wait!”

Sibyl’s voice, hoarse from babbling, became no more than a husky whisper, though she strove to make it louder.  She struggled half upright, and the nurse restrained her.  “I’d get up out of this bed to show her she can’t do such things to me!  I was absolutely ladylike, and she walked out and left me there alone!  She’ll see!  She started after Bibbs before Jim’s casket was fairly underground, and she thinks she’s landed that poor loon—­but she’ll see!  She’ll see!  If I’m ever able to walk across the street again I’ll show her how to treat a woman in trouble that comes to her for help!  It wouldn’t have hurt her any—­it wouldn’t—­it wouldn’t.  And Edith needn’t have told what she told Roscoe—­it wouldn’t have hurt her to let me alone.  And he told her I bored him—­telephoning him I wanted to see him.  He needn’t have done it!  He needn’t—­needn’t—­” Her voice grew fainter, for that while, with exhaustion, though she would go over it all again as soon as her strength returned.  She lay panting.  Then, seeing her husband standing disheveled in the doorway, “Don’t come in, Roscoe,” she murmured.  “I don’t want to see you.”  And as he turned away she added, “I’m kind of sorry for you, Roscoe.”

Her antagonist, Edith, was not more coherent in her own wailings, and she had the advantage of a mother for listener.  She had also the disadvantage of a mother for duenna, and Mrs. Sheridan, under her husband’s sharp tutelage, proved an effective one.  Edith was reduced to telephoning Lamhorn from shops whenever she could juggle her mother into a momentary distraction over a counter.

Edith was incomparably more in love than before Lamhorn’s expulsion.  Her whole being was nothing but the determination to hurdle everything that separated her from him.  She was in a state that could be altered by only the lightest and most delicate diplomacy of suggestion, but Sheridan, like legions of other parents, intensified her passion and fed it hourly fuel by opposing to it an intolerable force.  He swore she should cool, and thus set her on fire.