_Miss Reed_, with burlesque wildness: “You shall!” _Miss Spaulding_ involuntarily desists. “There was a moment—a fatal moment—when he said he thought he ought to tell me that if I found oil amusing I could go on; but that he didn’t believe I should ever learn to use it, and he couldn’t let me take lessons from him with the expectation that I should. There!” _Miss Spaulding_, with awful reproach: “And you call that less than nothing? I’ve almost a mind never to speak to you again, Ethel. How _could_ you deceive me so?” _Miss Reed_: “Was it really deceiving? _I_ shouldn’t call it so. And I needed your sympathy so much, and I knew I shouldn’t get it unless you thought I was altogether in the right.” _Miss Spaulding_: “You are altogether in the wrong! And it’s _you_ that ought to apologize to _him_—on your bended knees. How _could_ you offer him money after that? I wonder at you, Ethel!” _Miss Reed_: “Why—don’t you see, Nettie?—I did keep on taking the lessons of him. I did find oil amusing—or the oilist—and I kept on. Of course I had to, off there in a farmhouse full of lady boarders, and he the only gentleman short of Crawford’s. Strike, but hear me, Henrietta Spaulding! What was I to do about the half-dozen lessons I had taken before he told me I should never learn to use oil? Was I to offer to pay him for these, and not for the rest; or was I to treat the whole series as gratuitous? I used to lie awake thinking about it. I’ve got little tact, but I couldn’t find any way out of the trouble. It was a box—yes, a box of the deepest dye! And the whole affair having got to be—something else, don’t you know?—made it all the worse. And if he’d only—only—But he didn’t. Not a syllable, not a breath! And there I was. I _had_ to offer him the money. And it’s almost killed me—the way he took my offering it, and now the way you take it! And it’s all of a piece.” _Miss Reed_ suddenly snatches her handkerchief from her pocket, and buries her face in it.—“Oh, dear—oh, dear! Oh!—hu, hu, hu!” _Miss Spaulding_, relenting: “It was awkward.” _Miss Reed_: “Awkward! You seem to think that because I carry things off lightly I have no feeling.” _Miss Spaulding_: “You know I don’t think that, Ethel.” _Miss Reed_, pursuing her advantage: “I don’t know it from you, Nettie. I’ve tried and _tried_ to pass it off as a joke, and to treat it as something funny; but I can tell you it’s no joke at all.” _Miss Spaulding_, sympathetically: “I see, dear.” _Miss Reed_: “It’s not that I care for him”— _Miss Spaulding_: “Why, of course.”