CHAPTER X.
MRS. READE'S ADVICE.
RACHEL was not a heroine. She was simply a sweet and interesting girl; except that she was unusually pretty, by no means above the ordinary level of nice girls. She was better than a great many that we are acquainted with, no doubt, but she was not so good as some.
And she had, as has been already indicated, that fault which, of all faults, perhaps, is most common to girls, whether nice or otherwise—that amiable weakness that is more disastrous in its consequences than many a downright vice—she was, if not quite a coward, cowardly.
She was afraid to meet difficulties in the open, as it were—to attack the main body and scatter them, and have done with it; she sheltered herself in ambush, and made desultory attacks on flank and rear with temporary compromises, hating the thought of duplicity and longing to do right, yet most of all dreading the violent, harsh hurt to tender sensibilities (whether her own or other people's) that was inevitable in the shock of a pitched battle.
It is a defect in a woman's character very much to be deplored, of course, and it is one that seems unpardonable to a strong-minded person.
Nevertheless, it is much more of a misfortune than a fault (and we may as well say the same, while we are about it, of all our constitutional defects, from red hair to kleptomania, since we did not choose our parents nor the social conditions to which we were born); and to Rachel, whose instinctive truthfulness and high sense of moral rectitude prompted her to struggle hard, if vainly, against it, it was purely a misfortune, and at no time in her life more so than now.
For, after turning the question over and over in her mind through all that feverish and wakeful night, she finally decided that in breaking off her engagement with Mr. Kingston she would not mention, either to him or to anyone else, the place that Mr. Dalrymple now occupied in her affections and affairs.