“One is apt to become lax, too democratic—it’s the tendency of this western country,” Mrs. Toomey assented. She felt very exclusive and elegant at the moment.
Mrs. Pantin’s eyes had been upon her work, now she raised them and looked at Mrs. Toomey squarely.
“Have you seen—a—Miss Prentice lately?”
Mrs. Toomey had the physical sensation of her heart flopping over. That was it, then! She had the feeling of having been trapped—hopelessly cornered. In a mental panic she answered:
“Not lately.”
“Are you expecting to see much of her?”
There was something portentous in the sweetness with which Mrs. Pantin asked the question.
It was a crisis—not only the test of her promised friendship and loyalty to Kate but to her own character and courage. Was she strong enough to meet it?
It was one of Mrs. Toomey’s misfortunes to be not only self-analytical, but honest. She had no hallucinations whatever regarding her own weaknesses and shortcomings. As she called a spade a spade, so she knew herself to be by instinct and early training a toady. Of the same type, in appearance and characteristics, in this trait, lay the main difference in the two women: while Mrs. Pantin with her better intelligence was intensely selfish, Mrs. Toomey’s dominant trait was a moral cowardice that made her a natural sycophant.
No quaking soldier ever exerted more will power to go into battle than did Mrs. Toomey to answer: