"Time blots out the bad and leaves the good still to remind you," she said. "You may not believe it, but it is so. I always remember the happy things and slip the unhappy. It's not only things that happen, but people that made them happen. Get far enough away from people, and you find the parts in them you hate grow dimmer and the parts you like grow brighter. That's why the natural feeling is to speak kindly of the dead. We generally feel kindly to them. At least I do."
"It's true," declared Jane. "When anybody's dead, part of 'em always rises up again on people's tongues, and we don't speak well of them who are dead only because they are dead and can't defend themselves, but because time, as you say, Margery, keeps the good and lets the bad go. I can say it to you and Jeremy, though I wouldn't to anybody else. Take your own mother. I always feel ever so much kinder to her when I escape from hearing her, or seeing her for a week or so."
"You oughtn't to say that, Jane," declared her husband. "It's a very doubtful speech."
"Not it," she answered. "No use pretending. You don't see your mother like the rest of the world, because she don't see you like the rest of the world. And Margery's right. If she don't know, who should?"
"Ask yourself, Jane. You're married and have got plenty of sense to see things. Suppose Jeremy and you was parted for some great, terrible deed done by him: a bee in Jeremy's bonnet, for which he was sorry enough. And suppose, with time, you hadn't only forgiven him, as a Christian, but really and truly, as a wife and a woman. And suppose everything—everything that had made your life, and that you'd made of your life, was taken away, and you were left stranded. What would it be to you?"
"Hell," said Jane frankly. "There's no other word for it."
"And what would you do, Jeremy, if that had happened to you?" continued his sister. "Would you feel that, for her soul's sake, Jane must never come back to you?"
"I'm glad to say no such thing could happen to me, and it's idle worrying to think what you'd do if a thing happened that can't happen," answered the man. "And now you're here, it will be good for you to get away from your own vexations for a bit and lend a hand with mine. And first I may tell you that I've seen your husband that was."
"Seen him? Oh, Jeremy!"
"Keep it dark. I didn't seek him. He cornered me and would talk. Don't think I yielded about it. Not at all. I was firm as a rock with him, because, of course, mother's dead right in that matter; but there it is. Jacob Bullstone was very wishful indeed to get into touch with you, and seemed to think he had a right. But I hit out from the shoulder fearlessly, and he heard my honest opinion of him and so on. However, I'm a man of the world notwithstanding, and nobody knows how difficult the world is better than I do. So up to a certain point and, well within my conscience, I may do as I'm done by in the matter."