“Are you sure? You’ve probably cut her; if not now, at least in the past. And in a cut if you’re not first you’re nowhere. That’s what keeps up so many quarrels.”
The word roused Mrs. Lidcote to a renewed sense of realities. “But the Purshes,” she said—“the Purshes are so strong! There are so many of them, and they all back each other up, just as my husband’s family did. I know what it means to have a clan against one. They’re stronger than any number of separate friends. The Purshes will never forgive Leila for leaving Horace. Why, his mother opposed his marrying her because of—of me. She tried to get Leila to promise that she wouldn’t see me when they went to Europe on their honeymoon. And now she’ll say it was my example.”
Her companion, vaguely stroking his beard, mused a moment upon this; then he asked, with seeming irrelevance, “What did Leila say when you wrote that you were coming?”
“She said it wasn’t the least necessary, but that I’d better come, because it was the only way to convince me that it wasn’t.”
“Well, then, that proves she’s not afraid of the Purshes.”
She breathed a long sigh of remembrance. “Oh, just at first, you know—one never is.”
He laid his hand on hers with a gesture of intelligence and pity. “You’ll see, you’ll see,” he said.
A shadow lengthened down the deck before them, and a steward stood there, proffering a Marconigram.
“Oh, now I shall know!” she exclaimed.
She tore the message open, and then let it fall on her knees, dropping her hands on it in silence.