“Now come downstairs, dear,” she said, “I’ve made delicious cornmeal gems for your supper.”
II
It was a bitter loss to Minnie. She drove Frankie to the station that last day with her heart like lead. And though she had voluntarily let her go, and said good-by to her steadily and cheerfully, her very real affection for her sister was hurt beyond remedy. She never again felt quite the same toward her, never lost that faint resentment; always remembered that Frances had wanted to go off and leave her, alone and lonely.
The house was dreadful when she re-entered it. She cried all day as she did her work, and went to sleep in miserable solitude. Oh, but she missed Frankie, the brilliant, the lovely, the ardent! And the more she missed her, the more deeply did she feel the wrong Frankie had done her.
Life had become unsupportable. She thought all the time of some way in which she could change it, a way which should, of course, satisfy her conscience.
For Minnie’s was a conscience which imperiously required satisfaction. She had always to feel sure that she was “doing right.” However, as she was always certain that all her aims were beyond reproach, her conscience never refused to sanction whatever means she employed in arriving at them.
She was more than a Jesuit. She did not so much believe that bad means were justified by a worthy end; she was simply convinced that no means used by her were, or could possibly be, bad.
Remorse and regret were unknown to her. And defeat, too, she had not as yet encountered. From her earliest years she had known how to get her own way. Either a serious manner made any request seem reasonable, or, if this failed, thoughtful consideration had always showed her a way to victory.
And yet, for all her crookedness and her muddle-headedness, and her fierce and ridiculous ruthlessness, wasn’t there something about Minnie that was really sublime? When you look at her whole life, in all its preposterousness, can you really say whether or not she was good? Or bad? Or perhaps was not either good or bad, but elemental and innocent, even in harm, like a force of nature?
She bent her mind now upon her problem, surveyed her situation from every angle. Useless to deny that she considered Mr. Petersen. She turned him over and over in her mind, and, not without deep study, rejected him. He absolutely would not do. She couldn’t be Mrs. Petersen. Although he had never asked her, never mentioned the subject at all.