"I think it is exceedingly fair," was all he said.
"Really?" she asked. She certainly did not want to go back to the
house, and, noble as Clarence might think her, she didn't feel a bit
like taking orders from Gail.
"She has made her bed--or it may even be, her beds," said Clarence.
"Now why don't you let her lie in it, or them?"
"Well, I don't want to go home," said Joy a little sadly.
"Let us be optimists, as I suggested some yards back," said Clarence
cheerfully. "Let us think of the wonderful effect it will all have
on Gail's moral nature. By the time she has produced the
eight-course dinner which I gather the worthy Dr. Hewitt requires to
keep him the good citizen he is, she will be ennobled to a terrible
degree. You have heard of the ennobling influence of toil, dear
child?"
"I have, but I never believed in it," said Joy. "It makes you cross,
especially peeling potatoes, and it's bad for your hands. And
judging by the number of maids who steal, it doesn't work at all."
"I suppose," Clarence resigned himself, "that if Melisande were
still spared to us in the flesh, she really would have talked this
way, except that she would have used a few more dots. But one is an
idealist. One is jarred. If you could recite, in your soft,
clear-cut voice that is so admirably adapted for poetry, a few
stanzas of something heartbreaking----" voluntarily.
Joy, not unnaturally, lost patience.
"I have spent my whole life, or a lot more of it than I want to,
reciting heartbreaking poetry," she told him.
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