“No, it wasn’t that,” Della said. “He was still in love with her, but he’d become sort of smart-alecky. He looked on her as something of a conquest. He wasn’t in such a hurry to get married, and he’d been running around with a crowd of boys that thought it wasn’t smart to have ideals. They had a sophisticated attitude, and... well, I’ll never forget the way she described it. She said the acid of their pseudo-realism had eaten the gold off his character and left just the base metal beneath.”
“So then what happened?” Mason asked.
“Then she naturally became bitter — toward men and toward love. At a time when most girls were seeing the world through rose-tinted spectacles, she was embittered and disillusioned. She didn’t care too much for dances, and parties, and things, and gradually became more and more interested in books. She said she formed her friendships among books; that books didn’t tease you along until they’d won your friendship, and then suddenly reverse themselves and slap you in the face.
“Along about that time, she acquired the reputation of being narrow-minded and strait-laced, and a poor sport. It started in with a few fellows whose vanity was insulted because she wouldn’t drink bathtub gin, and neck. They advertised her as an awful pill, and gradually that reputation stuck to her. Remember, Chief, she was in a small town. It’s pretty hard for people to really see each other in a small town. They only see the reputation which has been built up by a lot of word-of-mouth advertising.”
“Was that the way she described it?” Mason asked.
Della Street nodded.
“All right, go ahead. Then what happened?”
“Then, when she’d just about given up any idea of romance, along came Fremont Sabin. He was kindly and gentle, he wasn’t greedy. He had a philosophy of life which saw the beautiful side of everything. In other words, Chief, as nearly as I can explain it, there was Something of the idealism in this man that she had worshiped in this boy with whom she’d been in love. But, whereas the boy had the ideals of youth, and they weren’t strongly enough entrenched in him to withstand the cynicism and cheap worldly wisdom of his associates, this man had battled his way through every disillusionment life had to offer, and won his idealism as an achievement, as an ultimate goal. His ideals stood for something — they were carefully thought out. They’d stood the test of time.”
“I guess,” Mason said thoughtfully, “Fremont C. Sabin was really a wonderful character.”
“Apparently he was, Chief. Of course, he played an awful trick on her, but...”