"I suppose it looks silly, if not worse, to you," Stella said. "But I can't help what you think. My reason has dictated every step I've taken since last fall. If I'd really given myself up to sentimentalism, the Lord only knows what might have happened."
"Exactly," Linda responded drily. "Now, there's no use beating around the bush. We get so in that habit as a matter of politeness,—our sort of people,—that we seldom say in plain English just what we really mean. Surely, you and I know each other well enough to be frank, even if it's painful. Very likely you'll say I'm a self-centered little beast, but I'm going to marry your brother, my dear, and I'm going to marry him in the face of considerable family opposition. I am selfish. Can you show me any one who isn't largely swayed by motives of self-interest, if it comes to that? I want to be happy. I want to be on good terms with my own people, so that Charlie will have some of the opportunities dad can so easily put in his way. Charlie isn't rich. He hasn't done anything, according to the Abbey standard, but make a fair start. Dad's patronizing as sin, and mother merely tolerates the idea because she knows that I'll marry Charlie in any case, opposition or no opposition. I came over expressly to warn you, Stella. Anything like scandal now would be—well, it would upset so many things."
"You needn't be uneasy," Stella answered coldly. "There isn't any foundation for scandal. There won't be."
"I don't know," Linda returned, "Walter Monohan came to Seattle a boat ahead of me. In fact, that's largely why I came."
Stella flushed angrily.
"Well, what of that?" she demanded. "His movements are nothing to me."
"I don't know," Linda rejoined. She had taken off her gloves and was rolling them nervously in a ball. Now she dropped them and impulsively grasped Stella's hands.
"Stella, Stella," she cried. "Don't get that hurt, angry look. I don't like to say these things to you, but I feel that I have to. I'm worried, and I'm afraid for you and your husband, for Charlie and myself, for all of us together. Walter Monohan is as dangerous as any man who's unscrupulous and rich and absolutely self-centered can possibly be. I know the glamour of the man. I used to feel it myself. It didn't go very far with me, because his attention wandered away from me before my feelings were much involved, and I had a chance to really fathom them and him. He has a queer gift of making women care for him, and he trades on it deliberately. He doesn't play fair; he doesn't mean to. Oh, I know so many cruel things, despicable things, he's done. Don't look at me like that, Stella. I'm not saying this just to wound you. I'm simply putting you on your guard. You can't play with fire and not get burned. If you've been nursing any feeling for Walter Monohan, crush it, cut it out, just as you'd have a surgeon cut out a cancer. Entirely apart from any question of Jack Fyfe, don't let this man play any part whatever in your life. You'll be sorry if you do. There's not a man or woman whose relations with Monohan have been intimate enough to enable them to really know the man and his motives who doesn't either hate or fear or despise him, and sometimes all three."
"That's a sweeping indictment," Stella said stiffly. "And you're very earnest. Yet I can hardly take your word at its face value. If he's so impossible a person, how does it come that you and your people countenanced him socially? Besides, it's all rather unnecessary, Linda. I'm not the least bit likely to do anything that will reflect on your prospective husband, which is what it simmers down to, isn't it? I've been pulled and hauled this way and that ever since I've been on the coast, simply because I was dependent on some one else—first Charlie and then Jack—for the bare necessities of life. When there's mutual affection, companionship, all those intimate interests that marriage is supposed to imply, I daresay a woman gives full measure for all she receives. If she doesn't, she's simply a sponge, clinging to a man for what's in it. I couldn't bear that. You've been rather painfully frank; so will I be. One unhappy marriage is quite enough for me. Looking back, I can see that even if Walter Monohan hadn't stirred a feeling in me which I don't deny,—but which I'm not nearly so sure of as I was some time ago,—I'd have come to just this stage, anyway. I was drifting all the time. My baby and the conventions, that reluctance most women have to make a clean sweep of all the ties they've been schooled to think unbreakable, kept me moving along the old grooves. It would have come about a little more gradually, that's all. But I have broken away, and I'm going to live my own life after a fashion, and I'm going to achieve independence of some sort. I'm never going to be any man's mate again until I'm sure of myself—and of him. There's my philosophy of life, as simply as I can put it. I don't think you need to worry about me. Right now I couldn't muster up the least shred of passion of any sort. I seem to have felt so much since last summer, that I'm like a sponge that's been squeezed dry."
"I don't blame you, dear," Linda said wistfully. "A woman's heart is a queer thing, though. When you compare the two men—Oh, well, I know Walter so thoroughly, and you don't. You couldn't ever have cared much for Jack."