After she had danced the third time with him he led her hastily to a chair against the stairway, deposited her like an umbrella, and left her. She did not mind his desertion, but sat panting with the breathlessness of the dance and with the joy of having been in Asaph’s arms. Then she heard low voices on the stairway, voices back of her, just above her head. She knew them perfectly. Asaph was quarreling with Birdaline. Birdaline was attacking Asaph because he had danced three times with Josie. "But she’s the hostess!" Asaph had retorted, and Birdaline snapped back: "Then why don’t she dance with some of the other fellas, then? Everybody’s noticing how you honey-pie round her." "Well, I danced with Deb Larrabee three times, too," Asaph pleaded. "Why don’t you fuss about that?" Deborah perked an anxious ear to hear how Birdaline would accept this rivalry, and Birdaline’s answer fell into her ear like poison: "Deb Larrabee! Humph! You can dance with that old thing till the cows come home, and I won’t mind. But you can’t take me to a party and dance three times with Josie Barlow. You can’t, and that’s all. So there!" Asaph had a fierce way with women. He talked back to them as if they were men. And now he rounded on Birdaline: "I’ll take who I please, and I’ll dance with who I please after I get there, and if you don’t like it you can lump it!" Deborah did not linger to hear the result of the war that was sure to be waged. There was no strength for curiosity in her hurt soul. She wanted to crawl off into a cellar and cower in the rubbish like a sick cat. Birdaline’s opinion of her was a ferocious condemnation for any woman-thing to hear. It was her epitaph. It damned her, past, present, and future. She sneaked home without telling anybody good-by. She had the next dance booked with Phineas Duddy, but she felt that he would not remember her if he did not see her. And since on the next day nobody–not even Phineas–ever mentioned her flight, she knew that she had not been missed. She cried and cried and cried. She told her mother that she had a bad cold, to excuse her eyes that would not stop streaming. She cried herself out, as mourners do; then gradually accepted life, as mourners do. That was long ago, and now, after all these years–years that had proved the truth of Birdaline’s estimate of her; years in which Birdaline had married Asaph out of Josie’s arms, and Josie had married Phineas out of Birdaline’s private graveyard, and both of them had borne children and endured their consequences–even now Deborah must hear again the same relentless verdict as before. Time had not improved her or brought her luck or lover, husband or child. She had thought that she had grown used to herself and her charmless lot, but the wound began to bleed afresh. She had the same impulse to take flight–to play the cat in the cellar–again. But her escape was checked by a little excitement.