In so helpless a fidelity Mr. Dodge felt something touching; and perhaps, too, he felt that men must keep men’s secrets. At all events, he made a high resolve. It would be hard on Mrs. Dodge, even unfair to her; but then and there he made up his mind that for the sake of Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite’s husband he would never tell anybody—and of all the world he would never tell Mrs. Dodge—what he had learned that day about Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite’s husband’s loyalty.
XVIII
LILY’S FRIEND ADA
INDOORS Mr. Dodge too quickly found other matter to occupy his mind. Mrs. Dodge hurried down the stairs to set before him an account of a new phase in Lily’s present romance, and they began their daily discussion of their daughter’s beglamoured condition. In a way this was a strange thing for them to do, because, like many other fathers and mothers in such parental mazes, they realized that they struggled with a mystery beyond their comprehension. Lily’s condition was something about which they really knew nothing, and least of all did they guess what part her dearest girl-friend had in it.
Lily had formed with the sturdy Ada Corey one of those friendships that sometimes suggest to observers an unworthy but persistent thought upon the profundity of girlish vanity. So often is a beautiful girl’s best girl-friend the precise companion piece to set off most abundantly the charms of the beauty, or, if both girls of a pair be well-favoured, so frequently is one dark and the other fair, and each the best obtainable background for the other, that the spectator is almost forced to suppose many such intimacies to be deliberately founded upon a pictorial basis.
But this is not to say that these decorative elections to friendship are unaccompanied by genuine fondness; and although Lily Dodge found her background in the more substantial Ada, she found also something to lean upon and cling to and admire. For Lily was one of those girls we call ethereal, because they do not seem intended to remain long in a world their etherealness makes appear gross. They usually do remain as long as other people do, yet their seeming almost poised for a winging departure brings them indulgences and cherishings not shown to that stouter, self-reliant type to which Ada Corey was thought to belong.
Late on that same gray but rainless November afternoon, Ada, herself, spoke of this elaborate difference between them. “I don’t see why you worry, Lily,” she said. “I believe you could get away with anything! You’re the kind that can.”
“Oh, not this!” Lily protested, in a wailing whisper. No one was near them; but in her trouble she seemed to fear the garrulity of even the old forest trees of the park through which the two were taking an autumnal stroll. “Nobody in the world could get out of such a miserable state of things as I’ve got myself into now, Ada.”
But this was by no means Miss Corey’s first experience of her friend’s confidences of despair. “I wouldn’t bother about it at all, if I were you, Lily,” she said, cheerfully. “I wouldn’t give it a thought.”
“You wouldn’t?” Lily cried, feebly, and her incredulity was further expressed by her feet, which refused to bear her onward in so amazed a condition. She halted, facing her companion in a stricken manner. “You wouldn’t give it a thought? When I’ve just told you that this time it’s three!”