“I want to ask your advice. You know so much more about the ways of the world than I do.” She drew from the pocket of her muslin dress a thick letter. “Do you think there are any circumstances under which it would be right for a married woman to receive—”
She was so naïve, Judith could with difficulty repress a smile.
“I write a good many letters to my attorney, Mr. Ramsay. He has a wife.”
“But those are business letters.”
“Not always. I write to him when I am blue or in doubt. His wife detests letter-writing. She usually adds a postscript.”
“She sees the letters—and replies?”
“Why, to be sure. You mean, Mrs. Trench, the kind of letters a woman could not show her husband? I’m afraid that is never quite safe.”
“I ignored the first—and the second. This one came on Friday. And then the minister preached that sermon on regeneration through suffering. He said it was our duty to help God to chastise the wayward soul. This man ... the one who wrote to me....” She faltered, then went on resolutely: “He is very unhappy. It is a man I met on the train—and he fell in love with me. Of course I repulsed him. I told him what a splendid husband I had. And in this letter he says that when I praised David to him—on the train—it was all he could do to keep from carrying me off bodily—it threw him into such a jealous rage. I ought to be furious with him.” She stared into vacancy, adding slowly: “but I’m not.”
This new Lavinia had suddenly come upon some bewildering apparition. Her fingers twitched, and a yellow pallor drank up the flush in her rounded cheeks. A chance acquaintance on a railroad train! Eileen might have fallen beneath the glamour of such a romance. But for a woman of Mrs. Trench’s age and temperament! It was unthinkable.
“Mrs. Ascott, tell me ... do people ever really get over things?”