"I haven't, I can honestly say. But Estelle is very keen about the mill girls. She wants to do all sorts of fine things for them; and she's specially friendly with Missis Dinnett's daughter. And she's heard things that puzzled her young ears naturally, and she told me that some people say you're being too kind to Sabina and other people say you're treating her hardly. Of course, that puzzled Estelle, clever though she is; but, as a man of the world, I saw what it meant and that kindness may really be cruelty in the long run. You'll forgive me, won't you?"
"Of course, my dear chap. If one lives in a hole like Bridetown, one must expect one's affairs to be common property."
"And if they are, what does it matter as long as they are all straightforward? I never care a button what anybody says about me, because I know they can't say anything true that is up against me; and as to lies, they don't matter."
"And d'you think I care what they say about me?"
"Rather not. Only if a girl is involved, then the case is altered. I'm not a saint; but—"
"When anybody says they're not a saint, you know they're going to begin to preach, Arthur."
Waldron did not answer for a minute. He stopped and lighted his pipe. To Raymond, Sabina appeared unmeasurably distant at this midnight hour. His volatile mind was quick to take colour from the last experience, and in the aura of the smoking concert, woman looked a slight and inferior thing; marriage, a folly; domestic life, a jest.
Waldron spoke again.
"You won't catch me preaching. I only venture to say that in a little place like this, it's a mistake to be identified with a girl beneath you in every way. It won't hurt you, and if she was a common girl and given to playing about, it wouldn't hurt her; but the Dinnetts are different. However, you know a great deal more about her than I do, and if you tell me she's not all she seems and you're not the first and won't be the last, then, of course I'm wrong and enough said. But if she's all right and all she's thought to be, and all Estelle thinks her—for Estelle's a jolly good student of character—then, frankly, I don't think it's sporting of you to do what you're doing."
The word 'sporting' summed the situation from Waldron's point of view and he said no more.