The Harbison Man

She talked for an hour, having got between me and the door, and she
scolded Jim and Bella thoroughly. But they did not hear it, being
occupied with each other, sitting side by side meekly on the divan with
Jim holding Bella's hand under a cushion. She said they would have to be
very good to make up for all the deception, but it was perfectly
clear that it was a relief to her to find that I didn't belong to her
permanently, and as I have said before, she was crazy about Bella.

I sat back in a chair and grew comfortably drowsy in the monotony of her
voice. It was a name that brought me to myself with a jerk.

"Mr. Harbison!" Aunt Selina was saying. "Then bring him down at once,
James. I want no more deception. There is no use cleaning a house and
leaving a dirty corner."

"It will not be necessary for me to stay and see it swept," I said,
mustering the rags she had left of my self-respect, and trying to pass
her. But she planted herself squarely before me.

"You can not stir up a dust like this, young woman, and leave other
people to sneeze in it," she said grimly. And I stayed.

I sat, very small, on a chair in a corner. I felt like Jezebel, or
whatever her name was, and now the Harbison man was coming, and he
was going to see me stripped of my pretensions to domesticity and of a
husband who neglected me. He was going to see me branded a living lie,
and he would hate me because I had put him in a ridiculous position. He
was just the sort to resent being ridiculous.