And Edith
needn't have told what she told Roscoe--it wouldn't have hurt her
to let me alone. And HE told her I bored him--telephoning him I
wanted to see him. He needn't have done it! He needn't--needn't--"
Her voice grew fainter, for that while, with exhaustion, though she
would go over it all again as soon as her strength returned. She lay
panting. Then, seeing her husband standing disheveled in the doorway,
"Don't come in, Roscoe," she murmured. "I don't want to see you."
And as he turned away she added, "I'm kind of sorry for you, Roscoe."
Her antagonist, Edith, was not more coherent in her own wailings,
and she had the advantage of a mother for listener. She had also
the disadvantage of a mother for duenna, and Mrs. Sheridan, under her
husband's sharp tutelage, proved an effective one. Edith was reduced
to telephoning Lamhorn from shops whenever she could juggle her mother
into a momentary distraction over a counter.
Edith was incomparably more in love than before Lamhorn's expulsion.
Her whole being was nothing but the determination to hurdle everything
that separated her from him. She was in a state that could be altered
by only the lightest and most delicate diplomacy of suggestion, but
Sheridan, like legions of other parents, intensified her passion and
fed it hourly fuel by opposing to it an intolerable force.
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