Mr. Dodge made the unfortunate admission that he had recently sent Mrs. Braithwaite a check for a hundred dollars, his subscription to the Workers’ Welfare League; and he was forced into subsequent admissions: he had no interest in the Workers’ Welfare League, and could give no reason for sending a check to it except that Mrs. Braithwaite had written him appealing for a subscription. She was sure he wouldn’t like to miss the chance to aid in so splendid a movement, she said. Now, as Mrs. Braithwaite had previously written twice to Mrs. Dodge in almost the same words, and as Mrs. Dodge had twice replied declining to make a donation, the argument (so to call it) on Mrs. Dodge’s part was a heated one. It availed her husband little to protest that he had never heard of Mrs. Braithwaite’s appeals to his wife; Mrs. Dodge was too greatly incensed to be reasonable. Later in the day she was remorseful, realizing that she had taken poor Mr. Dodge for her anvil because he was within reach, and what she really wanted to hammer wasn’t. Her remorse applied itself strictly to her husband, however, and she had none for her feeling toward the lady next door. Mrs. Dodge and her neighbour had never discovered any point of congeniality: Mrs. Braithwaite’s high serenity, which Mrs. Dodge called suavity, was of so paradoxical a smoothness that Mrs. Dodge said it “rubbed the wrong way from the start.” The uncongeniality had increased with time until it became a settled dislike, so far as Mrs. Dodge was concerned; and now, after Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite’s successful appeal to Mr. Dodge for what Mr. Dodge’s wife had refused, the dislike was rankling itself into a culmination not unlike an actual and lusty hatred. Mrs. Dodge realized her own condition;—she knew hatred is bad for the hater; but she could not master the continuous anger within her. Fascinated, she watched Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite at the “tea”; could not help watching her, although, as the victim of this fascination admitted to herself in so many words, the sight was “poison” to her. Nor was the poison alleviated by the effect of Mrs. Braithwaite upon the other guests: everywhere the angelic presence moved about the capacious rooms it was preceded and followed by deference. And when Mrs. Braithwaite joined a woman or a group of women, Mrs. Dodge marked with a hot eye how that woman or group of women straightway hushed a little and looked noble. XV MRS. DODGE DECLINES TO TELL MRS. DODGE went home early. “I oughtn’t to have come,” she told her hostess, confidentially, in parting. “I try to be a Christian sometimes, but this is one of the days when I think Nero was right.” “But what——” “I may tell you—some day,” Mrs. Dodge promised, and gloomily went her way. At dinner that evening she was grim, softening little when her husband plaintively resumed his defence. Lily inquired why her mother was of so dread a countenance.