"I'm not sure," said Miss Easter impressively, "that I should quite, absolutely, always trust her."
Lady Rossiter's common-sense did not altogether admit of her accepting so remarkable a reason for assuming untrustworthiness, but she was entirely in accord with the result of Miss Easter's logic, however defective the means by which that result was obtained.
"It's curious that you should say that," she remarked slowly. "Instinct is a strange thing, Iris."
"Yes, isn't it? They always say a woman's instinct is never wrong," glibly returned Miss Easter. "But I don't mean anything unkind about Miss Marchrose, truly I don't; there's only one thing I don't like about her."
Lady Rossiter made a sound expressive of enquiry.
"I never can bear people who try to be sarcastic," murmured Iris, voicing unaware the fundamental distrust which governs the whole of the British middle classes.
"Satire is a very cheap, unworthy weapon," said Lady Rossiter, not without inward reminiscences of Sir Julian as she spoke. "But to be quite fair, I don't think I've ever heard poor Miss Marchrose try to be satirical or anything of that sort. She's generally rather tongue-tied and awkward when I'm there. You see, Iris, I'm afraid she knows that I have heard a good deal about her, one way and another."
Lady Rossiter hesitated, remembered Mark, and decided to go on.
"I am afraid there is not much doubt that Miss Marchrose once did a very, very heartless action, and I am afraid that heartlessness and meanness are only too terribly apt to go together. There is something about the hard lines of her mouth—but after all, how can I cast the first stone? I had rather let the facts speak for themselves."
Followed the narrative of Captain Isbister, his engagement to a girl not of his own class, his accident, his offer to release the girl, and her prompt acceptance of it, culminating in the unbridled display of anguish witnessed in the nursing-home by Captain Isbister's attendant, which climax was received by Iris far otherwise than it had once been received by Sir Julian Rossiter.