“No you weren’t,” she said. “No one was horrid but myself. I was proud and self-righteous. But,” she added brokenly, “I have been punished.”
She began to cry and I led her into the house.
“Tell me after we have had lunch,” I said. “You must be tired and hungry.”
She said that she could eat nothing, and was as good as her word.
Throughout the meal she looked miserably, and yet with a kind of fierce wistfulness, at little Rose, who did not know in the least what to make of it—why this stranger should be here at all, why the tears rolled down her cheeks with no accompanying uproar, why she refused such delicious cheese-cakes.
A more uncomfortable meal I never ate, and all the while I was speculating as to what had happened. Could the placid George have revolted at last and left her? But that was impossible. Had he been speculating and come to disaster? More likely.
When we were left alone the story burst forth. It was not George. In a way it was worse, more damaging to her pride: it was her youngest daughter Angelica. Angelica, aged only twenty, and not even engaged, was going to have a baby.
O these babies! All the troubles and complications of the world come from them. If only they could be eliminated the globe would gradually fall back into a permanent peaceful wilderness. That was perhaps my thought during the silence that followed her announcement. But “Good Heavens!” was all that I could think to say: said, I hope, with a note of sympathy to balance the surprise.
“I came to you,” Mrs. Stratton resumed, “because poor George is so helpless, and you are a doctor and, I trust, in spite of my behaviour to you, a friend of the family—almost, in a way, one of the family.”
It was no time to repudiate the second suggestion.