She threw down the gloves with special vigor. “Oh, don’t begin on that. The scrape’s there. What we have to find is the way out.”
“Well, do you see it any more clearly?”
“Do you?”
He came near to her. “I see this—that I can’t let her throw herself away for me. I’ve been thinking it over, and I want to ask your opinion of this plan. Let’s sit down.”
She thought his plan the maddest that was ever proposed, and yet she accepted it. She accepted it 207 because she was suspicious, jealous, and unhappy. “It’ll give me the chance to watch—and see,” she said to herself, as he talked.
In his opinion Letty couldn’t take their point of view because she was so inexperienced. It seemed to her a simple thing to go away, leaving them with the responsibilities of her future on their consciences; and it would not seem other than a simple thing till she saw life more as they did. To bring her to this degree of culture they must be subtle with her, and patient. They mustn’t rush things. They mustn’t let her rush them. To end the situation in such a way as to make for happiness they must end it at a point where all would be best for all concerned. For Barbara and himself nothing would be best which was not also best for the girl. What would be best for the girl would be some degree of education, of knowledge of the world, so that she might go back to the life whence they had plucked her less likely to be a prey to the vicious. In that case, if they supplied her with a little income she would know what to do with it, and would perhaps marry some man in her own class able to take care of her.
Barbara’s impulse was to cry out: “That’s the most preposterous suggestion I ever heard of in my life!” But she controlled this quite reasonable prompting because another voice said to her: “This will give you the opportunity to keep an eye on them. If he’s not true in his love for you—if there is an infatuation on his part for this common and vulgar creature—you’ll be able to detect it.” Jealousy loving to suffer she was willing to inflict torture on herself for the sake of catching him in disloyalty.
Expecting a storm, and bringing out what he considered his wise proposals with great embarrassment, Allerton was surprised and pleased at the sympathetic calm in which she received them.
“So that you’d suggest––?”