“I don’t know anything about Paul’s inner workings, and as for Rankin, I don’t know whether he’s in love with her or not. He’s sorry for her—he’s touched by her—”
Mrs. Sandworth felt the ground slip from beneath her feet. “Good gracious me! If he’s not in love with her, nor she with him, what are you making all this fuss about?”
The doctor thrust out his lips. “I’m only protesting in my usual feeble, inadequate manner, after the harm’s all done, at idiots and egotists laying their dirty hands on a sacred thing—the right of youth to its own life—”
“Well, if you call that a feeble protest—!” she called after him.
He reappeared, hat in hand. “It’s nothing to what I’d like to say. I will add that Daniel Rankin’s a man in a million.”
Mrs. Sandworth responded, rather neatly for her, that she should hope so indeed, and added, “But, Marius, she couldn’t have married him—really! Mercy! What had he to offer her—compared with Paul? Everybody has always said what a suitable marriage—”
Dr. Melton crammed his hat on his head fiercely and said nothing.
“But it’s so,” she insisted.
“He hasn’t anything to offer to Marietta, perhaps.”
“Marietta’s married!” Mrs. Sandworth kept herself anchored fast to the facts of any case under discussion.