"Pshaw! You know as well as I do, only you are so obtuse, or so meek," (A mercy she was, or she would never have lived a week, not to say twenty years, with Henrietta Gascoigne.) "Once for all, tell me what you propose doing?" "Doing? I?" "Yes, you. Can't you see, my dear Maria, that it is your business to inform your brother what you have discovered concerning his wife?" "Discovered?" "Certainly; it is a discovery, since she has never told it--never told her husband that before her marriage she had been in the habit of singing duets (love-songs, no doubt, most improper for any young woman) with a young gentleman of Sir Edwin's birth and position, who, of course, never thought of marrying her--(your brother, I do believe, is the only man in Avonsbridge who would have so committed himself)--and who, by the light way he speaks of her, evidently shows how little respect he had for her." "Perhaps," mildly suggested Aunt Maria, "perhaps she really has told dear Arnold." "Then why did he not tell us--tell me? Why did he place me in the very awkward position of not knowing of this previous acquaintance of his wife's? Why, in that very unpleasant conversation we had one day at the Lodge, was I the only person to be kept in ignorance of his reasons--and very good reasons I now see they were--for forbidding Sir Edwin's visits? Singing duets together! Who knows but that they may meet and sing them still? That new piano! and we turned out of the house directly afterward--literally turned out! But perhaps that was the very reason she did it--that she might meet him the more freely. Oh, Maria! your poor deluded brother!" It is strange the way some women have--men too, but especially women--of rolling and rolling their small snowball of wrath until it grows to an actual mountain, which has had dragged into it all sorts of heterogeneous wrongs, and has grown harder and blacker day by day, till no sun of loving-kindness will ever thaw it more. In vain did poor Maria ejaculate her pathetic "Oh, Henrietta!" and try, in her feeble way, to put in a kindly word or two; nothing availed. Miss Gascoigne had lashed herself up into believing firmly every thing she had imagined and it was with an honest expression of real grief and pain that she repeated over and over again, "What ought we to do? Your poor, dear brother!"