And I have yet to learn what you mean by talking about a rendezvous! And I want to know," she continued, suddenly stopping her rocking and tilting the rockers impertinently behind her, as, with her elbows squared on the chair arms, she tilted her own face defiantly up into Mrs.Horncastle's, "how a woman in your position--who doesn't live with her husband--dares to talk to ME!" There was a lull before the storm.

Mrs.Horncastle approached nearer, and, laying her hand on the back of the chair, leaned over her, and, with a white face and a metallic ring in her voice, said: "It is just because I am a woman IN MY POSITION that I do! It is because I don't live with my husband that I can tell you what it will be when you no longer live with yours--which will be the inevitable result of what you are now doing.

It is because I WAS in this position that the very man who is pursuing you, because he thinks you are discontented with YOUR husband, once thought he could pursue me because I had left MINE.

You are here with him alone, without the knowledge of your husband; call it folly, caprice, vanity, or what you like, it can have but one end--to put you in my place at last, to be considered the fair game afterwards for any man who may succeed him.

You can test him and the truth of what I say by telling him now that I heard all." "Suppose he doesn't care what you have heard," said Mrs.Barker sharply.
"Suppose he says nobody would believe you, if 'telling' is your game.
Suppose he is a friend of my husband and he thinks him a much better guardian of my reputation than a woman like you.