A silence followed this news. Men know one another. Arnold knew Shippen. He sat now staring at the tablecloth. It was his duty, but he would be sorry to tell his wife. She liked Mrs. Cutter. Also, it was his duty to see that the bank was secure in its dealings with her. Until this moment he would have advanced her any reasonable sum. He would warn Lambkin in the morning to keep an eye on her balance. A woman like that had very few financial scruples, and no sense of the future. They usually lived by the day. Still, this fellow Shippen might be mistaken. Arnold had been a resident of Shannon only a few years, but he had inferred that Mrs. Cutter was devoted to her home and husband, an ordinary woman, good looking but not attractive. He would have sworn she was not attractive. She had never attracted him and in a discreet way he had a man’s eye.
He accompanied Shippen to his train; then he went home and told Mrs. Arnold.
She was indignant. She said she did not believe a word of it. Later, Mrs. Shaw came in to borrow some yarn for a sweater she wished to finish that evening. She got the yarn, and this story about Mrs. Cutter.
She agreed with Mrs. Arnold that in her opinion there was not a word of truth in it. Still they speculated about how and where Helen had spent those five months when she was not in Shannon nor with her husband in New York.
We may live above reproach, but few of us live above suspicion of one sort or another. It is the active character-sketching faculty we all have for drawing real or imaginary likenesses of each other’s secret faces. Women are especially felicitous in this art, once they get the suggestion. They rarely originate the idea. The most damaging gossip we ever hear descends to us almost invariably from men. They whisper it to us; we tell it and get more credit for authorship than we deserve.
Thus Mr. Arnold had repeated to his wife what Shippen had told and intimated about the Cutters. It is not in the nature of any woman to retain such stuff. She must expel it. Therefore Mrs. Arnold told Mrs. Shaw.
And so the news flew, until the town was posted with it by the time Helen descended into it the next afternoon.
It is one thing to suffer a great humiliation in secret, and quite another thing to read it in the eyes of every familiar face. Helen understood that her secret was out at last. Nothing else could account for the manner of the various people whom she met. She had known, of course, that it could not be kept; but she had hoped she might have had a little more time to protect herself with the one defense she had planned.
Her lips were trembling when she came out of the bank and entered the car. “Drive out the River road,” she said.
Buck glanced back, startled by some emotional quality in her voice, which was usually a smooth and literal-speaking voice. He was much more surprised by the order she had given, for the rain was coming in rattling gusts on the March winds and the River road would be “slick as glass.” Still, he took it, the big limousine reeling and sliding.