Page:The woman, the man, and the monster (IA womanmanmonster00dawe).pdf/257

 eda might return at any moment and be forced to meet this unpleasant person. In- wardly he fumed at the misfortune which laid this accident at his door. He had neither in- clination nor interest enough to rebut the man’s wild tirades; they were in keeping with what he knew of him, what he had heard. And in a way his own hands were tied. What even if he should have met her? Truly no one could know less of her than he did. And inside of it all, as it were, was a thought which almost amounted to a fear.

Slowly the time dragged onward, his un- welcome guest now falling into a fit of moody abstraction, and now dilating in a vein which sorely plagued his listener. His theme was ever the inconstancy and ingratitude of wom- an, against whom he seemed to bear a bitter resentment, a resentment so little in accord with Vermont’s own feelings that he grew in- tolerably weary of the infliction. Yet the man, lost in the consciousness of his own wrongs, real or imaginary, paid no heed to the utter boredom, fast merging upon irritability, of his host. That the world could possibly have any other grievance than that which animated him