“But people said you were going to marry him the year you came out. And no one understood what happened then. And now—how can it possibly be right? You simply can’t!” Delia incoherently cried.
“Oh—people!” said Charlotte Lovell wearily.
Her married cousin looked at her with a start. Something thrilled in her voice that Delia had never heard in it, or in any other human voice, before. Its echo seemed to set their familiar world rocking, and the Axminster carpet actually heaved under Delia’s shrinking slippers.
Charlotte Lovell stood staring ahead of her with strained lids. In the pale brown of her eyes Delia noticed the green specks that floated there when she was angry or excited.
“Charlotte—where on earth have you come from?” she questioned, drawing the girl down to the sofa.
“Yes. You look as if you had seen a ghost—an army of ghosts.”
The same snarling smile drew up Charlotte’s lip. “I’ve seen Joe,” she said.
“Well?—Oh, Chatty,” Delia exclaimed, abruptly illuminated, “you don’t mean to say that you’re going to let any little thing in Joe’s past—? Not that I’ve ever heard the least hint; never. But even if there were....” She drew a deep breath, and bravely proceeded to extremities. “Even if you’ve heard that he’s been ... that he’s had a child—of course he would have provided for it before....”
The girl shook her head. “I know: you needn’t go on. ‘Men will be men’; but it’s not that.”