She stopped him. “You don’t understand. It goes on all the time. And if she does this much under my very eyes, what doesn’t she get out of him when they’re alone together?”
“There might be something reassuring in that,” Hobart suggested. “If she spends her energies getting these trifles from him—because of course that’s all they are to a man in old John’s position—doesn’t that look as if her designs might be limited to——”
“No, it does not,” Mrs. Simms interrupted, promptly.
“But——”
“No,” his wife repeated. “Don’t you see that the very fact of her wanting the trifles would make her want something a great deal more important, and that’s to be in a position where she wouldn’t have to work for them?”
“Well, then,” her husband returned;—“if she expects to reach that position by supplanting Mildred, she has a ridiculous ambition!”
“Is it?” Mildred asked, unhappily. “If John were any other kind of man, it might be ridiculous.” Tears came into her eyes that had been dry until now; but she struggled with herself and kept more from coming. “Isn’t it ironical?” she said. “The very goodness of such a man as John, his simple kindness, his idealizing—the very things I’ve cared for most in him—that they should be his weakness and just what leaves him open to the easy cajoling of a crude trespasser like Julietta Voss! Don’t you understand, Hobart? I know you didn’t understand this afternoon, but don’t you now? You thought I was jealous of him, I know. Perhaps I am; perhaps I do want to keep him for myself; but I’m his wife; why shouldn’t I? And I know I’m better for him than she’d be. Oh, don’t you understand? I want to protect him!”
Hobart came to her and took her hand. “Mildred, old John hasn’t the remotest idea you’re suffering like this. You’ve got to tell him about it.”
“But I can’t,” she cried. “I can’t let him think I’m just a jealous woman, and what else would he think of me if I told him the truth about her? That’s why I don’t want you to go out there with them to-morrow, Hobart.”
“Of course I won’t, since you ask it,” he said, mystified. “Yet I don’t see——”