“Not a bit,” Mrs. Cromwell echoed, carrying on the thought she had been following. “But Mr. Dodge and Mr. Cromwell haven’t had anybody to go about, day after day for years, proclaiming them and building up a legend about them. Nobody has any idea that they’re great men, poor things! Don’t you see where that puts you and me, Lydia?”
“No, I don’t.”
“My dear!” Mrs. Cromwell exclaimed. “Why, even Battle himself didn’t know that he was a great man until he married Amelia and she believed he was—and told him he was—and started her long career of going about making everybody else sort of believe it, too.”
“I think it’s simply her own form of egoism,” said the emphatic Mrs. Dodge. “She’d have done exactly the same whoever she married.”
“Precisely! It’s Amelia’s way of being in love—she’s a born idolizer. But you didn’t answer me when I asked you where that puts us.”
“You and me?” Mrs. Dodge inquired, frowning.
“Don’t you see, if she’d married my husband, for instance, instead of Battle, everybody’d be having the impression by this time that Mr. Cromwell is a great man? He’d have felt that way himself, too, and I’m afraid it would give him a great deal of pleasure. Haven’t we failed as wives when we see what Amelia’s done for her husband?”
“What an idea!” The two ladies had been walking slowly as they talked;—now they came to a halt at their parting place before Mrs. Cromwell’s house, which was an important, even imposing, structure of the type called Georgian, and in handsome conventional solidity not unlike the lady who lived in it. Across the broad street was a newer house, one just finished, a pinkish stucco interpretation of Mediterranean gaiety, and so fresh of colour that it seemed rather a showpiece, not yet actually inhabited though glamoured with brocaded curtains and transplanted arbor vitæ into the theatrical semblance of a dwelling in use. Mrs. Dodge glanced across at it with an expression of disfavour. “I call the whole thing perfectly disgusting!” she said.