"Oh! Won't I? . . . I feel they will haunt me all my days. What is that couplet?—
"He who hath a thousand friends hath not a friend to spare;
But he who hath one enemy shall meet him everywhere."
A man said to me yesterday that what is done on the voyage to the Cape is known at Cairo within a week if it is sufficiently scandalous." She wept.
"A blue look-out for me!" thought her listener, dismally imagining the name of April Poole flashing from one end of the great continent to another. Not only at the Cape would she be debarred from earning her living! This impression was confirmed by some of the remarks women made to her later in the day. They were all quite willing to be friendly as long as she was not in the company of the black sheep.
"She might just as well take ship back to England," one said. "No one will employ her as a governess after this. The story will be all over Cape Town within an hour of our arrival."
"You can't live these things down in Africa," said another. "Of course, she might get a job up-country, where people are not particular and only want a kind of servant to look after their children."
It was no use April protesting against the cruelty of condemning a girl for ever because of one indiscretion. Her listeners only looked at her suspiciously. One old Englishwoman, who had lived many years in South Africa, put the case more cynically than kindly:
"Girls who earn their living are not allowed the luxury of indiscretion. If it had been you, now——"
"Do you mean that I should have been forgiven by reason of my position?"
"My dear," was the dry reply, "it is the same old snobbish world wherever you go. What constitutes a crime in one strata of society is only eccentricity in another."