"If you are not heartless," I said, in a low voice; "if you can care for anybody's feelings as much as you care when the china is broken, who is it that you can feel for? You didn't seem to care very much when we thought that Frank had broken his back. Whom do you care for, then?"
I felt my lips tremble with anger, and for one moment I hated her. Oh that I should have to write it down! My own sister, who had been all the world to me two months ago! But it was true. Even through all the crystallizing, cooling mists of distance, I can recall the horrible feeling yet: I knew that—for one moment—I hated her.
"What do you mean?" said she, below her breath, trying to draw back.
"Ah, I can see very well how it might be," continued I, hurrying my words one on top of the other breathlessly—"how you might persuade yourself that you were true to him, and persuade yourself that you were doing a fine honorable thing keeping so strictly to your bargain with mother, when all the time it was because you never wanted to see him, and didn't care whether he loved you or not, and cared very much more whether somebody else loved you—somebody else who, but for you, might have belonged to another person. I can fancy it all very well," cried I, tearing Frank's letter that I held in my hand into little atoms and scattering them about the floor; "I can see just how it might happen, and nobody be to blame. No, nobody be to blame at all."
"Margaret, Margaret, for God's sake, collect yourself!" cried Joyce, her voice breaking into something like a sob. "You frighten me. What do you mean? What can you mean?"
"No, nobody to blame," repeated I, wildly, without paying any heed to her; "only just what one might have known would happen. One, with every gift that God can give, and the other, with—nothing but a vile temper that makes folk shun her even after they've seemed to be friends with her. What does it matter that you have promised to marry another man? Nobody knows it; and when one is as beautiful as you are, I suppose it isn't in human nature not to like to see one's beauty draw people away from what had been good enough for them before. I ought to have known it. There's nobody to blame, of course."
"Margaret," said my sister—and even in the midst of my fury the firm tone of her voice surprised me and checked me for a moment—"you must explain yourself. I don't understand you; I don't, indeed. Perhaps, if you knew everything, you wouldn't have the heart to speak so. You are cruel, and you are unjust. You say I am cold; but even if I am cold I can suffer, Meg; you must recollect that I can suffer."
"Suffer!" cried I, bitterly. "I wish you could suffer one little tiny bit of what I suffer. Ah, for pity's sake, don't let me say any more; don't let me go on; let me go!"
"I can't let you go," said Joyce, with that unusual firmness that did crop up at times so unexpectedly in her. "You must tell me first what you meant when you said that I took people away from what had been good enough for them before."