“And do you see yet how magnificently you were mistaken last year?” asked Edith. “For if you do, I wish you would tell Hugh so. He knows, by the way, that you tried to dissuade me from marrying him.”
Peggy’s radiance went behind a cloud.
“Ah, I don’t think you should have told him that!” she said.
“I was sorry for it too,” said Edith, “but there was no way out.”
Peggy let down the window and looked out for a moment, still frowning.
“So that is it,” she said. “I knew something had come between Hugh and me.”
“Tell him you see you were wrong then,” said Edith again.
Peggy did not answer and her silence was not in need of interpretation. But that she did not think she was wrong (since this was clearly the meaning of it) failed now to reach Edith; it could not at this moment cloud her sun.
“And even if you were right,” she said softly, “I would willingly pay all that may be demanded for that which I have received. You warned me of the long gray years. What do they matter to a woman who has once had sunrise in her heart?”
Peggy drew a long breath; she felt in every fibre of herself that Edith did not look forward, did not allow for the limitations and rules under which life goes on. But at the moment she felt it would be like telling a happy child that the years brought heaviness of limb and anxiety of heart, and bidding it therefore cease from its games and prepare itself for adult life. For Edith’s happiness, it seemed to her, had in the mysterious ways of the human soul taken her back to childhood again with its unreflecting, sensitive joys. These few months had wiped off the misery and bitterness of the past, and perhaps her spring was to follow her summer, as her autumn had preceded it. She sat up with a quick imperative movement characteristic of her.