“But she can’t get over it, my dear child!” said Mrs. Averil, gazing at her daughter in a certain alarm. “How can one get over disgrace like that or lift one’s head again—unless one is an Adrienne Toner! Oh, when I think of that woman and of what she’s done! For she is responsible for it all! Every bit of it. Meg was a good girl, at heart; always. In spite of that silly liquid powder. And so I tell Eleanor. Adrienne is responsible for it all.”
“I don’t, Mother; that’s not my line at all,” said Nancy. “I tell her that what Meg says is true.” Nancy touched the pony with the whip. “If it hadn’t been for Adrienne she might have done much worse.”
“Really, my dear!” Mrs. Averil murmured.
“Come, Nancy,” Oldmeadow protested; “that was a retrospective threat of Meg’s. Without Adrienne she’d never have considered such an adventure—or its worse alternative. Encourage your aunt to curse Adrienne. Your Mother’s instinct is sound there.”
But Nancy shook her head. “I don’t know, Roger,” she said. “Perhaps Meg would have considered the alternative. Girls do consider all sorts of things nowadays that Mother and Aunt Eleanor, in their girlhood, would have thought simply wicked. They are wicked; but not simply. That’s the difference between now and then. And don’t you think that it’s better for Meg and Captain Hayward to go away so that they can be married than to be, as she says, really rotters; than to be, as she says, cheats and hypocrites and steal their happiness?”
“My dear child!” Mrs. Averil again murmured, while Oldmeadow, finding it, after all, a comfort to have a grown-up Nancy to discuss it with, said, “My contention is that, left to herself, Meg would have thought them both wicked.”
“Perhaps,” Nancy said again; “but even old-fashioned girls did things they knew to be wicked sometimes. The difference Adrienne has made is that Meg doesn’t think herself wicked at all. She thinks herself rather noble. And that’s what I mean about Aunt Eleanor. It will comfort her if she can feel a little as Adrienne feels—that Meg isn’t one bit the worse, morally, for what she’s done.”
“Are you trying to persuade us that Meg isn’t guilty, my dear?” Mrs. Averil inquired dryly. “Are you trying to persuade us that Adrienne has done us all a service? You surely can’t deny that she’s behaved atrociously, and first and foremost, to Barney. Barney could have known nothing about it, and can you conceive a woman keeping such a thing from her husband?”
But Nancy was feeling the pressure of her own realizations and was not to be scolded out of them. “If Meg is guilty, and doesn’t know it, she will suffer dreadfully when she finds out, won’t she? It all depends on whether she has deceived herself or not, doesn’t it? I’m not justifying her or Adrienne, Mother; only trying to see the truth about them. How could Adrienne tell Barney when it was Meg’s secret? We may feel it wrong; but she thought she was justified.” The colour rose in Nancy’s cheek as she named Barney, but she kept her tired eyes on her mother and added, “I don’t believe it was easy for her to keep it from him.”
“My dear, anything is easy for her that flatters her self-importance!” cried Mrs. Averil impatiently. “I’ll own, if you like, that she’s more fool than knave—as Meg may be; though Meg never struck me as a fool. Things haven’t changed so much since my young days as all that; it’s mainly a matter of names. If girls who behave like Meg find it pleasanter to be called fools than knaves, they are welcome to the alternative. Noble they never were nor will be, whatever the fashion.”