“I—I don’t know. Don’t you think it might be that they both just thought they were going to marry somebody—that really doesn’t want to marry them? It might be all a mistake, you know.”
“I don’t think it’s a mistake. David doesn’t make mistakes.”
“He might make one,” Eleanor persisted.
Margaret found the rest of her story harder to tell than she had anticipated. Eleanor, wrapped in the formidable aloofness of the sensitive young, was already suffering from the tale she had come to tell,—why, it was not so easy to determine. It might be merely from the pang of being shut out from confidences that she felt should have been shared with her at once. 266
She waited until they were both ready for bed (their rooms were connecting)—Eleanor in the straight folds of her white dimity nightgown, and her two golden braids making a picture that lingered in Margaret’s memory for many years. “It would have been easier to tell her in her street clothes,” she thought. “I wish her profile were not so perfect, or her eyes were shallower. How can I hurt such a lovely thing?”
“Are the ten Hutchinsons all right?” Eleanor was asking.
“The ten Hutchinsons are very much all right. They like me better now that I have grown a nice hard Hutchinson shell that doesn’t show my feelings through. Haven’t you noticed how much more like other people I’ve grown, Eleanor?”
“You’ve grown nicer, and dearer and sweeter, but I don’t think you’re very much like anybody else, Aunt Margaret.”
“I have though,—every one notices it. You haven’t asked me anything about Peter yet,” she added suddenly.
The lovely color glowed in Eleanor’s cheeks for an instant. 267