"Taught me not to care what people say?" said Marie—"yes, I may certainly assure you of that. For instance—" and she paused.
Mildred rustled suggestively.
"There is no reason I should not tell you," said Marie. "It is this. Oddly enough, some fortnight or three weeks ago exactly the same thing was said about me as you are afraid will be said about you. I was supposed, in fact, to be much attached to Jim. So I am; we are the greatest friends. But this charming world uses 'friend' in two senses. Probably some cook of a woman, finding nothing to say to some valet of a man, said so. And the kitchen section of London society, I have been told, talked about it. But any perfectly inane piece of fabrication like that soon dies of—of its own inanition."
"But who on earth started anything so absurd?" asked Mildred.
"I have no idea; I did not even want to know. I was angry, I will allow, for a day or two. Then other things came and swallowed it up. It became merely dull. It simply did not interest me. I assure you I had almost forgotten it. I suppose one has lots of enemies one does not know of. Probably I had made some cook of a woman, as I said, angry without intending it. I—yes, something of that sort."
It was not till these words were on her lips that a sudden idea, wild and preposterous as it might be, occurred to her. It came into her mind quite unbidden, and was wholly unaccountable. Mildred laughed quite naturally.
"Ah, you are the Snowflake," she said—"our one unsmirchable. It is all very well for you to shrug your shoulders at what the world says!"
"That is exactly what I am told was said of me," said she quietly. "I was supposed to have melted. Did the story, then, reach you?"
"Some sort of a story did," said she. "It seemed to me not even worth repeating to you."