Elizabeth!" said he, and I stared at him in a daze.

"The deuce is to pay," said he. "Aunt Elizabeth, did you ever know our
next-door neighbor before his marriage?"

"Certainly," said I; "when we were both infants. I believe they had
gotten him out of petticoats and into trousers, but much as ever, and my
skirts were still abbreviated. It was at Harriet Munroe's before she was
married."

"Have you been to walk with him?" gasped poor Cyrus.

"I met him on my way to the post-office last night, and he walked along
with me, and then as far as his house on the way home, if you call that
walking out," said I. "You sound like the paragraphs in a daily paper.
Now, what on earth do you mean, if I may ask, Cyrus?"

"Nothing, except Mrs. Temple is in there raising a devil of a row," said
Cyrus. He gazed at me in a bewildered fashion. "If it were Peggy I could
understand it," he said, helplessly, and I knew how distinctly he saw
the old-maid aunt as he gazed at me. "She's jealous of you, Elizabeth,"
he went on in the same dazed fashion. "She's jealous of you because her
husband walked home with you. She's a dreadfully nervous woman, and, I
guess, none too well. She's fairly wild. It seems Temple let on how he
used to know you before he was married, and said something in praise
of your looks, and she made a regular header into conclusions. You have
held your own remarkably well, Elizabeth, but I declare--" And again
poor Cyrus gazed at me.

"Well, for goodness' sake, let me go in and see what I can do," said I,
and with that I went into the parlor.

I was taken aback. Nobody, not even another woman, can tell what a woman
really is. I thought I had estimated Ned Temple's wife correctly. I
had taken her for a monotonous, orderly, dull sort of creature, quite
incapable of extremes; but in reality she has in her rather large,
flabby body the characteristics of a kitten, with the possibilities of
a tigress. The tigress was uppermost when I entered the room. The woman
was as irresponsible as a savage. I was disgusted and sorry and furious
at the same time. I cannot imagine myself making such a spectacle over
any mortal man. She was weeping frantically into a mussy little ball of
handkerchief, and when she saw me she rushed at me and gripped me by the
arm like a mad thing.

"If you can't get a husband for yourself," said she, "you might at least
let other women's husbands alone!"

She was vulgar, but she was so wild with jealousy