"Never you mind. I don't approve of him. No more would you if you knew anything about him. Don't you worry. You couldn't stand him, Vi, if you had him here." She pushed her plate violently away from her with its untasted food, and planted her elbows on the table. She leaned forward, her chin sunk in her hands, the raised arms supporting this bodily collapse. Foreshortened, flattened by its backward tilt, its full jowl strained back, its chin thrust toward him and sharpened to a V by the pressure of her hands, its eyes darkened and narrowed under their slant lids, her face was hardly recognizable as the face he knew. But its sinister, defiant, menacing quality was lost on Ranny. He said to himself: "She's rattled, poor girl; and she's worried. That's why she looks so queer." "You haven't told me yet," she persisted, "what you've got against him." And Ranny replied in a voice devoid of rancor: "He's a low swine. If we took him in I should have to build a pigsty at the bottom of the garden for him, and I can't afford it. Granville isn't big enough for him and me. And it wouldn't be big enough for him and you, neither. You'd be the first to come and ask me to chuck him out." He spoke low, for he heard the neighbors talking in the next garden. "Fat lot you think of _me_!" she cried. "It's you I _am_ thinking of." She rose from the table, dragging the cloth askew in her trailing, hysterical stagger. She lurched to the French window that, thrown back against the wall, opened onto the little garden. And she stood there, leaning against the long window and pressing her handkerchief to her mouth till the storm of her sobbing burst through. The people in the next garden stopped talking. "For God's sake," said Ranny, "shut that window." He got up and shut it himself, moving her inert bulk aside gently for the purpose. And she stood against the wall and laid her face on it and cried. And Ranny called upon the Lord in his helplessness. He went and put his arm round her, and she thrust him from her, and then whimpered weakly: "Wh--wh--wh--why are you so unkind to me?" "Unkind! Oh, my Aunt Eliza!" "You don't care. You don't care," she moaned. "You don't care what happens to me. I might die to-morrow, and you wouldn't care." "Oh, come--" he ventured. But Violet wouldn't come. She was off, borne from him on the rising tide of hysteria. "It's true! It's true!" she cried. "Else you wouldn't use me like you do." "But look here. Whatter you goin' on about? Just because I don't want you to have anything to do with Mercier." She raised her flaming face at that. "It's a lie! It's a beastly lie! I never had anything to do with Mercier." "Who said you'd had anything to do with him?" "You did. And I hardly know him. I've hardly seen him. I've hardly spoken to him be--be--before." "I never said you had." "You thought it." "You know I didn't. How _could_ I think it?" "You _did_. That's why you wouldn't let him come. You won't trust me with him."