Rosamund found Mrs. Tregaskis, who never broke down, weeping violently among the piles of disordered pamphlets.
“Cousin Bertie! Don’t!” cried Rosamund fearfully. “Is it about Hazel?”
Bertha raised a piteously mottled and disfigured face.
“I’m beaten,” she cried. “Frederick has consented to this iniquitous marriage, and nothing can stop it now. My little girl, whom I’ve brought up to be good, and to whom I’ve tried to teach religion—that she should be willing to break my heart, and rush deliberately into sin, the first time temptation comes near her!”
“No—no. It’s not that. She doesn’t think it’s sin. She doesn’t believe it’s sin—not for an instant. Her point of view is different.”
“Her point of view!” cried Bertha bitterly. “How dare you talk to me, a woman of fifty, of such preposterous nonsense? You and she are children; you know nothing of life, you’ve had no experience. How can Hazel judge of what is right or wrong? She’s a child—a child.”
In the vehement repetition of the assertion, it seemed to Rosamund that she found her clue to Bertha Tregaskis’s impotent suffering. She would not, could not, admit in her daughter any claim to the rights of an individual.
Hazel’s judgment, unrecognized by her mother, carried with it no amazement to Rosamund.
Certain faiths, certain scruples and acceptances inborn in Rosamund and Frances, had been the veriest lip-service to the child Hazel always. Rosamund recognized in her the purest and most natural type of highly-evolved paganism.
“You know, Rosamund, I’m not doing anything wrong, although they won’t believe it. It isn’t wrong to me, and I don’t believe in an abstract right and wrong. Each individual case has its own laws.”