"We're only terrible sorry for all parties, Dinah," said Susan; "and we hope it will come smooth again."
"So do I," answered the younger; "but not the way you mean, Soosie. For it to come smooth is for John to understand I didn't do a wicked thing, only a mistaken thing. And I had to put the mistaken thing right."
She went over old ground and made it clear that none must expect her to go back.
"I hope I'll live to see John happily wedded," she said. "And I never shan't be happy, I reckon, till he is."
"And what about you?" asked Joe. "What's the truth, Dinah?"
She explained that she was not constituted to love.
"I'm like Soosie," she said. "Us be the sort that's happier single." But Miss Stockman laughed.
"You're a good few years too young to tell like that, Dinah. You wait till all this here storm be blowed over and 'tis calm weather in your mind again. You'm born to be married to the right one. If he don't come along, then, with your experience of making a mistake, you never will be married I dare say; but 'tis any odds he will come along I expect."
Dinah, however, shook her head.
"A mistake like what I've made be a very shattering thing," she said. "I wouldn't have the nerve to go into it no more. There's a lot of unmarried women wanted to carry on the work of the world nowadays."