"Listen," he said. Under the stress of embarrassment and alarm his cold blue eyes grew colder and his delicate nostrils quivered with an effect a little too like disdain. "I like you as well as another; no more, no less. I am in no position to think of love and marriage, and I have no inclination that way. I am willing to be friends with everybody, and nothing more with anybody." The sentences came with the cruel detachment of bullets; but, "Not again, not twice," was his uppermost thought. Any bluntness, any ruggedness, rather than another month like that of the past holiday season. He took a step away and looked to one side, toward the couch where his hat and coat were lying. "Go, if you will," she said. "And go as soon as you like. You are a contemptible, cold-hearted ingrate. You have grudged me every minute of your company, everywhere--and every second you have given me here. If I have been foolish it is over now, and there shall be nothing to record my folly." She stepped to the easel and hurled the canvas to the floor, where it lay with palette and brushes. Cope stood with his hat in his hand and his coat over his arm. He seemed to see the open volume of some "printed play." After all, there was a type which, even under emotional stress, gave a measure of instinctive heed to structure and cadence. Well, if there was relief for her in words, he could stand to hear her speak for a moment or two more, not longer. "One word yet," she said in a panting voice. "Your Arthur Lemoyne. That preposterous friendship cannot go on for long. You will tire of him; or more likely he will tire of you. Something different, something better will be needed,--and you will live to learn so. I should be glad if I never saw either one of you again!" She turned her stormy face away, and Cope slipped out with a blended sense of mortification, pain and relief. 28 _COPE ABSENT FROM A WEDDING_ Cope went out on the square with his being a-tingle. If Hortense, on another occasion, had thrown a dash of brine, on this occasion she had rubbed in the salt itself. And he had struck a harsh blow in turn; the flat of his mind was still stinging, as if half the shock of the blow had remained behind. "But it was no time for half-measures," he muttered to himself. "Not again; not twice!" he repeated. Hortense remained for several days in a condition of sullen anger--she was a cloud lit up by occasional unaccountable flashes of temper. "Whatever in the world is the matter with her?" asked her aunt in more directions than one. And Amy Leffingwell, blissfully busy over her little trousseau and her selection of china-patterns, protested and opened wide, inquiring blue eyes against the intrusion of such a spirit at such a joyous time. But Hortense, though better days intervened now and then, did not improve essentially; and she contrived at the climacteric moment of Amy's career to make herself felt--unduly felt--after all.