“Oh, so?” She uttered a little cry of triumph, and laughed in the tone of her outcry. “So you’re not so sure as you were a little while ago, when you implied that my mind was wandering! So you see there is something in it?”
“Only this: I admit the possibility that Julietta might want to have him attached to her as a sort of providing friend, to do little useful things for her and——”
“ ‘Little useful things’?” his wife said, scornfully. “Don’t you understand what type she belongs to? Only a few minutes ago you paid her caddy for her, and John rented a locker for her. Last week he got her a new set of golf clubs, Mildred told me. Julietta complained of her old ones, and he sent away for the most expensive clubs you can get in the country. When she said you put your friends into fortunes, she meant more than just to flatter you about the fortune you’ve put John Tower into; she meant you to begin to get the idea into your head that it would be pleasant some day to put her into one—or her worthless old father, perhaps!”
Then, as Hobart laughed loudly at an idea apparently so far-fetched, Anne defended it. “Oh, I know it was only her impulse and not deliberate, just a chance shot of hers; but she never misses a possibility, and that possibility was somewhere in the back of her head. Of course, it isn’t you, but John that she’s playing for. She’d rather have played for you; but she didn’t see any chance, of course. She discovered John’s weakness and did see the chance with him.”
“What weakness, Anne?”
“Why, the poor old thing’s childlike acceptance of women at the face value they put upon themselves, and his quaint belief that they say everything they mean and mean everything they say—just as he does himself. Mildred’s helpless because he’s such a helpless idealist; he tells her the only thing he can’t bear in a woman is when she’s so small-minded as to speak slightingly of any other woman! All Mildred can do is to suffer and not speak. I never saw anything so pitiful as what she did when you hurt her feelings so terribly.”
“When I did what?”
“When you insulted her awhile ago,” Mrs. Simms explained with calm frigidity. “She knew I’d told you what she was suffering;—I’d just told her I had. And then she had not only to listen to her husband accepting that girl’s overtures for another long tête-à-tête with him to-morrow, but to hear you promising to lend countenance to it by being used again as you’ve already been used three times. It was the same as either telling Mildred that she’s a fool, imagining the whole thing, or that you approve of Julietta’s little plans and intend to lend your aid to further them. You might as well have slapped my sister in the face.”
“Dear me!” he exclaimed. “Don’t look at it that way! I didn’t mean——”
“Didn’t you?” Anne had no compunctions whatever in punishing him to the best of her ability. “You’d already mocked her for suffering what no woman in her position could help suffering. Then, in addition to what she was already trying to bear and not show, you gave her some more to bear—and she couldn’t trust herself to speak; she could only run from you!”