"Do you think I would be better if I knew more, Aunt Agnes?"
"It is not a question of your being better, Geraldine; I think the trouble is that you are too good already. Do you believe your friends to be as good as you are?"
"Why, Aunt Agnes! Am I any better than you are, or Mrs. Thorpe, or my girl friends? Why do you say such things to me?"
"Because I must say them, my dear; you must know more about your friends. You are not more virtuous, perhaps, than the ones whom you have mentioned; but you are as a creature of another world compared to Max Morrison, for instance."
The seashell color in Geraldine's face deepened to flame, but ignoring the display of feeling she had been too unguarded to suppress, she met her aunt's eyes full and true.
"Is there anything objectionable about Max that I should know?" she asked.
Mrs. Mayhew knew that there was no turning back now. She wished to be honest with the girl and at the same time as charitable as possible toward others. She must show Geraldine that, desirable and praise-worthy as purity and chastity are, and obligatory as they are in a woman, she should not expect to find these qualities in this man, nor hardly in the degree that a pure-hearted girl possesses them, in any man, and that it would not be wise nor just, perhaps, to condemn Max for a lack of them. She recalled her husband's attitude on the subject, and although it did not break her resolution to be frank with the girl, it tempered it appreciably; and a queer blending of her conscientiousness and her husband's practicality were the result. A distorted vision pictured itself impishly before her. Being a woman, she should cleave virtuously to the good, but be willing to fall on her knees at the marriage altar and accept the bad! She felt that the magnitude of the question was crushing her, and that its complexity would be her undoing. The longer she hesitated for the words in which to express her meaning, the more helplessly lost she became, and Geraldine was waiting for the answer to a direct question.
"To allow you to believe that Max is virtuous as you understand virtue would not be justice to you, Geraldine," she said.
"Please be quite frank, Aunt Agnes. What is it you wish me to know?"
"None of us are perfect, my dear, and very few of us are good. It is a hard world to live in. Not many young men go through the trying period of early manhood unscathed, and it comes to us women sooner or later to know these things."