"You must not ask me that question," replied Louise, quietly firm. "But if nobody had told me about Langdon Jesse—and I shall not deny that I was told—I am sure my instinct would have taught me to suspect him of being—precisely what he is."
Mrs. Treharne shook her head dismally.
"It is exactly as I feared it would be, Louise," she said, sighing drearily. "You are narrow, restricted, pent-in; you haven't even a symptom of bigness of view; your horizon is no wider than the room in which you happen to be. I always feared they would make a prude of you. Now I see that my forebodings were right."
Louise, very much wrought upon, rose rather unsteadily and walked over to her mother's chair.
"You repel me a little, mother," she said in a low tone. "It hurts me to say that: but it is the truth. If I am a prude, then I am unconscious of it. It may be that I don't know your definition of the word." She paused and gazed about the room wearily. "If to be a prude," she resumed, "is to be conscious of the desire and the intention to be an honest woman, then, mother, I am a prude," her voice breaking a little. "And if one must be a prude to recoil from the hideous advances of a man like Langdon Jesse, then again I am a prude."
She had been unfairly placed on the defensive. She had not meant to wound. But, while her words cut her mother like the impact of thongs, they did not arouse within her a sense of the humiliation of her position.
"Louise," she asked, hoarsely, moistening her dry lips, "are you saying these—these stinging things with the deliberate purpose of reflecting upon your mother?"
Addressed to anybody else but Louise, the question would have been absurd in the opening it afforded.
"I should hate to have you think that," replied Louise, flushing hotly and taking her mother's hands. "You don't think such a thing, do you?"
"I don't know what to think," said her mother, taking the martyred tone, "when you say such horrid things. I never heard you say such—such flaying things before. I can't think what is coming over you."