"I only wish you cared more." She looked at Elizabeth helplessly a moment and then broke out with what she had been tempted all along to say.
"It's that Gordon Marriott! That's what it is! He has such strange, wild notions. He defends these criminals, it seems. I don't see how he can approve their actions the way he does."
"Why, mother!" said Elizabeth. "How you talk! You might think I was a little child with no mind of my own. And besides, Gordon does not approve of their actions, he disapproves of their actions, but he recognizes them as people, as human beings, just like us--"
"Just like us!" exclaimed Mrs. Ward, withdrawing herself wholly from any contact with the mere suggestion. "Just like us, indeed! Well, I'd have him know they're not like us, at all!"
Elizabeth saw how hopeless it was to try to make her mother understand Marriott's attitude, especially when she found it difficult to understand it herself.
"Just like us, indeed!" Mrs. Ward repeated. "You are certainly the most astonishing girl."
"What's the excitement?"
It was Dick, just entering the room. He was clean-shaved, and glowing from his plunge, his face ruddy and his eyes bright. He was good-humored that morning, for he had had nearly five hours of sleep. His mother poured his coffee and he began eating his breakfast.
"What's the matter, Bess?" he asked, seizing the paper his father had laid aside, and glancing at it in a man's ability to read and converse with women at the same time.
"Why, she threatens to go to the jail," Mrs. Ward hastened to reply, in her eagerness for a partizan in her cause. "And her father and Mr. Modderwell and Mr. Eades have all advised her that it would be improper--to say nothing of my own wishes in the matter."