Jeff, after insisting that he had been telling her for years, lapsed into a declaration of helpless perplexity. "How can I tell her more than I have been telling her all along?" he groaned. Rose said she would show him. She seated herself on the sofa, spread out her dress and placed him behind her.
"Now, do as I tell you--no, not so,--_so_;--now lean over,--put your arm--no, it is not necessary to touch me," as Jeff, with prompt apprehension, fell into the scheme, and declared that he was all right in a rehearsal, and that it was only in the real drama he failed. "Now say 'I love you.'" Jeff said it. They were in this attitude when the door opened suddenly and Margaret stood facing them, her large eyes opened wider than ever. She backed out and shut the door.
Lawyers know that the actions of a man on being charged with a crime are by no means infallible evidence of his guilt,--but it is hard to satisfy juries of this fact. If the juries were composed of women perhaps it would be impossible.
The ocular demonstration of a man's arm around a girl's waist is difficult to explain on more than one hypothesis.
After this Margaret treated Jeff with a rigor which came near destroying the friendship of a lifetime; and Jeff became so desperate that inside of a week he had had his first quarrel with Lawrence, who had begun to pay very devoted attention to Margaret, and as that young man was in no mood to lay balm on a bruised wound, mischief might have been done had not the Major arrived opportunely on the scene just as the quarrel came to a white-heat. It was in the hall one morning. There had been a quarrel. Jeff had just demanded satisfaction; Lawrence had just promised to afford him this peculiar happiness, and they were both glaring at each other, when the Major sailed in at the door, ruddy and smiling, and laying his hat on the table and his riding-whip across it, declared that before he would stand such a gloomy atmosphere as that created by a man's glowering looks, when there was so much sunshine just lying around to be basked in, he would agree to be "eternally fried in his own fat."
"Why, I had expected at least two affairs before this," he said jovially, as he pulled off his gloves, "and I'll be hanged if I shan't have to court somebody myself to save the honor of the family."