"You will make me think, Flo, that you are less true to him than she is."
"Perhaps it is so. Let him have what good such truth as hers can do him. For me, I feel that it is my duty to be true to myself. I will not condescend to indulge my heart at the cost of my pride as a woman."
"Oh, Florence, I hate that word pride."
"You would not hate it for yourself, in my place."
"You need take no shame to love him."
"Have I taken shame to love him?" said Florence, rising again from her chair. "Have I been missish or coy about my love? From the moment in which I knew that it was a pleasure to myself to regard him as my future husband, I have spoken of my love as being always proud of it. I have acknowledged it as openly as you can do yours for Theodore. I acknowledge it still, and will never deny it. Take shame that I have loved him! No. But I should take to myself great shame should I ever be brought so low as to ask him for his love, when once I had learned to think that he had transferred it from myself to another woman." Then she walked the length of the room, backwards and forwards, with hasty steps, not looking at her sister-in-law, whose eyes were now filled with tears. "Come, Cissy," she then said, "we will make an end of this. Read my letter if you choose to read it,—though indeed it is not worth the reading, and then let me send it to the post."
Mrs. Burton now opened the letter and read it very slowly. It was stern and almost unfeeling in the calmness of the words chosen; but in those words her proposed marriage with Harry Clavering was absolutely abandoned. "I know," she said, "that your son is more warmly attached to another lady than he is to me, and under those circumstances, for his sake as well as for mine, it is necessary that we should part. Dear Mrs. Clavering, may I ask you to make him understand that he and I are never to recur to the past? If he will send me back any letters of mine,—should any have been kept,—and the little present which I once gave him, all will have been done which need be done, and all have been said which need be said. He will receive in a small parcel his own letters and the gifts which he has made me." There was in this a tone of completeness,—as of a business absolutely finished,—of a judgment admitting no appeal, which did not at all suit Mrs. Burton's views. A letter, quite as becoming on the part of Florence, might, she thought, be written, which would still leave open a door for reconciliation. But Florence was resolved, and the letter was sent.
The part which Mrs. Burton had taken in this conversation had surprised even herself. She had been full of anger with Harry Clavering,—as wrathful with him as her nature permitted her to be; and yet she had pleaded his cause with all her eloquence, going almost so far in her defence of him as to declare that he was blameless. And in truth she was prepared to acquit him of blame,—to give him full absolution without penance,—if only he could be brought back again into the fold. Her wrath against him would be very hot should he not so return;—but all should be more than forgiven if he would only come back, and do his duty with affectionate and patient fidelity. Her desire was, not so much that justice should be done, as that Florence should have the thing coveted, and that Florence's rival should not have it. According to the arguments, as arranged by her feminine logic, Harry Clavering would be all right or all wrong according as he might at last bear himself. She desired success, and, if she could only be successful, was prepared to forgive everything. And even yet she would not give up the battle, though she admitted to herself that Florence's letter to Mrs. Clavering made the contest more difficult than ever. It might, however, be that Mrs. Clavering would be good enough, just enough, true enough, clever enough, to know that such a letter as this, coming from such a girl and written under such circumstances, should be taken as meaning nothing. Most mothers would wish to see their sons married to wealth, should wealth throw itself in their way;—but Mrs. Clavering, possibly, might not be such a mother as that.
In the meantime there was before her the terrible necessity of explaining to her husband the step which she had taken without his knowledge, and of which she knew that she must tell him the history before she could sit down to dinner with him in comfort. "Theodore," she said, creeping in out of her own chamber to his dressing-room, while he was washing his hands, "you mustn't be angry with me, but I have done something to-day."
"And why must I not be angry with you?"