"Of course not. Oliver must give it up, too. Oh, Jinny, a scandal, even where one is innocent, is so terrible. A woman—a true woman—would endure death rather than be talked about. I remember your cousin Jane Pendleton made an unhappy marriage, and her husband used to get drunk and beat her and even carry on dreadfully with the coloured servants—but she said that was better than the disgrace of a separation."
"But all that has nothing to do with me, mother. Oliver is an angel, and this is every bit my fault, not Abby's." The violence in her soul had passed, and she felt suddenly calm.
"Of course, darling, of course. Now that you see what it has led to, you can stop it immediately."
They were so alike as they stood there facing each other, mother and daughter, that they might have represented different periods of the same life—youth and age meeting together. Both were perfect products of that social order whose crowning grace and glory they were. Both were creatures trained to feel rather than think, whose very goodness was the result not of reason, but of emotion. And, above all, both were gentlewomen to the innermost cores of their natures. Passion could not banish for long that exquisite forbearance which generations had developed from a necessity into an art.
"I can't stop his going with her, because that would make people think I believed the things they say—but I can go, too, mother, and I will. I'll borrow Susan's horse and go fox-hunting with them to-morrow."
Once again, as on the afternoon when she had heard of Oliver's illness in New York, Mrs. Pendleton realized that her daughter's strength was more than a match for hers when the question related to Oliver.
"But the children, dear—and then, oh, Jinny, you might get hurt."
To her surprise Jinny laughed.
"I shan't get hurt, mother—and if I did——"
She left her sentence unfinished, but in the break there was the first note of bitterness that her mother had ever heard from her lips. Was it possible, after all, that there was "more in it" than she had let appear in her words? Was it possible that her passionate defence of Abby had been but a beautiful pretence?