"Go right on," she said—and knitted briskly.
"Do take my side, Mrs. Pettigrew," Miss Orella implored her. "Jane Bellair is trying to pull me up by the roots and transplant me to Colorado."
"And she says I shall have a better chance to marry out there—and ought to do it!" said Susie, very solemnly. "And Vivian objects to being shown the path of duty."
Vivian smiled. Her quiet, rather sad face lit with sudden sparkling beauty when she smiled.
"Grandma knows I hate that—point of view," she said. "I think men and women ought to be friends, and not always be thinking about—that."
"I have some real good friends—boys, I mean," Susie agreed, looking so serious in her platonic boast that even Vivian was a little amused, and Dr. Bellair laughed outright.
"You won't have a 'friend' in that sense till you're fifty, Miss Susan—if you ever do. There can be, there are, real friendships between men and women, but most of that talk is—talk, sometimes worse.
"I knew a woman once, ever so long ago," the doctor continued musingly, clasping her hands behind her head, "a long way from here—in a college town—who talked about 'friends.' She was married. She was a 'good' woman—perfectly 'good' woman. Her husband was not a very good man, I've heard, and strangely impatient of her virtues. She had a string of boys—college boys—always at her heels. Quite too young and too charming she was for this friendship game. She said that such a friendship was 'an ennobling influence' for the boys. She called them her 'acolytes.' Lots of them were fairly mad about her—one young chap was so desperate over it that he shot himself."
There was a pained silence.
"I don't see what this has to do with going to Colorado," said Mrs. Pettigrew, looking from one to the other with a keen, observing eye. "What's your plan, Dr. Bellair?"