"I don't suppose I shall ever be so happy as I used to think I should be with Ashley Mead," she said at last. "But I couldn't now. I should always be thinking of—of what's been happening lately. Irene, I loathe that sort of thing, don't you?"
"Oh, with men it's just—" Irene began.
"With some sort of men, I suppose so," Alice interrupted. "I tried to think it didn't matter, but—Could you care for a man if you knew he had done what Ashley has?"
In ninety hours out of a hundred, in ninety moods out of a hundred, Irene would have been ready with the "No" that Alice expected so confidently from her; with that denial she would instinctively have shielded herself from a breath of suspicion. But now, looking into the grave eyes upturned to hers, she answered with a break in her voice,
"Yes, dear; we must take what we can get, you know." Then she turned away and walked back to her tea-table; her own face was in shadow there, and thence she watched Alice's, which seemed to rise very firm and very white out of the high black collar of her mourning gown. She loved Alice, but, as she watched, she knew why Ashley Mead had left her and given himself over to Ora Pinsent; she had not often seen so nearly in the way men saw. Then she thought of what Bertie Jewett was; he could not love as this girl deserved to be loved. "And we don't always get what we deserve," she added, forcing another nervous laugh. "Most women have to put up with something like what you mean, only they're sensible and don't think about it."
"I'm considered sensible," said Alice, smiling.
"Sensible people are only silly in different ways from silly people," Irene declared, with a touch of fresh irritation in her voice. "Well then, it's no use?" she asked.
"It's no use trying to undo what's done." Alice got up and came and kissed her friend. "It was like you to try, though," she said.
"And I suppose it's to be—?"
"It's not to be anybody," Alice interrupted. "Fancy talking about it now!"