"No, but it is of interest to me if everything is all right with you. If everything is over and above-board, as the saying is, Miss Luella!" There was a throb to the silence, as she sat upright there in bed, that seemed to shape itself about her, like a trap. She buried her face suddenly into her hands. Then Mrs. Neugass rose, edging around the back of her chair as if to get clear of even propinquity. "I'm right?" she cried, hoarsely and rather coarsely. "I'm right, then? I took into my home a bad girl?" "No!--No!--No!--" Out of bed, her feet hastily into slippers and fumbling into her kimono so that the flow of her hair went down inside it, Lilly approached Mrs. Neugass, her gesture toward her and entreating. "Mrs. Neugass, you're horribly wrong in what you suspect. You must listen to me--" "You can exblain nothing to me except to get your clothes packed. How it goes to show you never can tell beoble from looks. Even my husband, who never gets deceived in human nature, 'She's a refined, intelligent girl to have around,' he says. My stepdaughter! A girl I am as careful with as if she was still eighteen, should go out of her way to get you before Auchinloss! No wonder he says it you are limited and that you fall just short of fine talent. You don't deserve it no better. Ain't you ashamed? You bad girl, you! I'm only sorry for the mother you say you got--your poor mother!" "Mrs. Neugass, this is outrageous! You haven't the right to speak to me like this! It was wrong, I admit, to--to deceive you. But I had my reasons--you wouldn't have taken me in. I'm not what--what you think I am!" "I don't care what you are and what you ain't. I only want you to pack your bags and go." "I won't go until you've heard me out!" "We're respegtable beoble!" "Oh, I know, Mrs. Neugass, your kind of respectability. I was reared on it. It's the cruelest respectability in the world. It has no outlook except through the narrow little bars of the small decencies you have erected about yourselves." "That fine talk don't save a girl's skin when she's in such a fix like you!" "I've more claims to your precious kind of respectability than you--than you think!" "I don't _think_ no more. I know! I don't say it's the nicest thing I should have looked once through your things. Even then I must have felt it in my bones. That little dress with the nursery rhyme on the yoke--how it was I didn't get suspicious then? All of a sudden last night, though--even while you was singing, it come over me, all these weeks I must have been blind."