"Oh, of course." She grasped at the impersonal note, but it escaped her. "If she only knew, she could so easily stop it."
"So you think if someone were to mention it?"
"That is why I came to you. I thought you might manage to drop a word that would let Angelica see how much it is hurting Mary. She wouldn't want to hurt Mary just for the sake of a little amusement. The plays can't be so very important, or they would be on the stage, wouldn't they?"
"Could you tell her, do you think?" It was the first time he had ever attempted to evade a disagreeable duty, and the question surprised her.
"Angelica wouldn't listen to a word I said. She'd just think I'd made it up, and I reckon it does look like a tempest in a teapot."
He met this gravely. "Well, it is natural that she shouldn't take a thing like that seriously."
"Yes, it's natural." She conceded the point ungrudgingly. "I believe Angelica would die before she would do anything really wrong."
If he accepted this in silence, it was not because the tribute to Angelica's character appeared to him to constitute an unanswerable argument. During the weeks when he had been groping his way to firmer ground, he had passed beyond the mental boundaries in which Angelica and her standards wore any longer the aspect of truth. He knew them to be not only artificial, but false; and Mrs. Timberlake's praise was scarcely more than a hollow echo from the world that he had left. That Angelica, who would lie and cheat for an advantage, could be held, through mere coldness of nature, to be above "doing anything really wrong," was a fallacy which had once deluded his heart, but failed now to convince his intelligence. Once he had believed in the sacred myth of her virtue; now, brought close against the deeper realities, he saw that her virtue was only a negation, and that true goodness must be, above all things, an affirmation of spirit.
"I'll see what I can do," he said, and wondered why the words had not worn threadbare.
"You mean you'll speak to Angelica?" Her relief rasped his nerves.