“Why, pray?”
“At all events, I shouldn’t be able to feel so much righteous indignation.”
“Why not?”
“He is pretty much of a product, isn’t he?—not worse, I suppose, than the men whose weakness enriches him. It’s a pity, of course, that one can’t painlessly pinch such people out of existence, as one would offensive insects.”
Eppie, across the table, eyed him, her anger quieted. “He is a product of a good many things,” she said, now in her most reasonable manner, “and he is going to be a product of some more before I’m done with him,—a product of my hatred for him and his kind, for one thing. That will be a new factor in his development. Gavan,” she smiled, “you and I are going to quarrel.”
“Dear Eppie!” Miss Barbara interposed. “Gavan, you must not take her seriously; she so often says extravagant things just to tease one.” Really dismayed, alternately nodding and shaking her head in reassurance and protest, she looked from one to the other. “And don’t, dear, say such unchristian things of anybody. She is not so hard and unforgiving as she sounds, Gavan.”
“Aunt Barbara! Aunt Barbara!” laughed Eppie, leaning her elbows on the table, her eyes still on Gavan, “my hatred for Macdougall isn’t nearly as unchristian as Gavan’s indifference. I don’t want to pinch him painlessly out of life at all. I think that life has room for us both. I want to have him whipped, or made uncomfortable in some way, until he becomes less horrid.”
“Whipped, dear! People are never whipped nowadays! It was a very barbarous punishment indeed, and, thank God, we have outgrown it. We will outgrow it all some day. And as to any punishment, I don’t know, I really don’t. Resist not evil,” Miss Barbara finished in a vague, helpless murmur, uncertain as to what course would at once best apply to Macdougall’s case and satisfy the needs of public sobriety.
“Perhaps one owes it to people to resist them,” Eppie answered.
“Oh, Eppie dear, if only you cared a little more for Maeterlinck!” sighed Miss Barbara, the more complex readings of whose later years had been somewhat incongruously adapted to her early simple faiths. “Do you remember that beautiful thing he says,—and Gavan’s attitude reminds me of it,—‘Le sage qui passe interrompt mille drâmes’?”