“That is the way things go in this world,” she said quietly. “Whenever you lose your temper, you always do something you didn’t intend to do when you started. I didn’t know that, and I wouldn’t have shown it to you purposely if I had known it; but it doesn’t alter the fact that you should know it. If you did know it no harm’s done but if you didn’t know it, you shouldn’t be allowed to marry Eileen without knowing as much about her as you did about Marian, and there was nothing about Marian that you didn’t know. I am sorry for that, but since I have started this I am going through with it. Now give me just one minute more.”
Then she went down the hall, threw open the door to her room, and walking in said: “You have seen Eileen’s surroundings; now take a look at mine. There’s my bed; there’s my dresser and toilet articles; and this is my wardrobe.”
She opened the closet door and exhibited a pair of overalls in which she watered her desert garden. Next ranged her khaki breeches and felt hat. Then hung the old serge school dress, beside it the extra skirt and orange blouse. The stack of underclothing on the shelves was pitifully small, visibly dilapidated. Two or three outgrown gingham dresses hung forlornly on the opposite wall. Linda stood tall and straight before John Gilman.
“What I have on and one other waist constitute my wardrobe,” she said, “and I told Eileen where to get this dress and suggested it before I got it.”
Gilman looked at her in a dazed fashion.
“I don’t understand,” he said slowly. “If that isn’t the dress I saw Eileen send up for herself, I’m badly mistaken. It was the Saturday we went to Riverside. It surely is the very dress.”
Linda laughed bleakly.
“That may be,” she said. “The one time she ever has any respect for me is in a question of taste. She will agree that I know when colours are right and a thing is artistic. Now then, John, you are the administrator of my father’s estate; you have seen what you have seen. What are you going to do about it?”
“Linda,” he said quietly, “what my heart might prompt me to do in consideration of the fact that I am engaged to marry Eileen, and what my legal sense tells me I must do as executor of your father’s wishes, are different propositions. I am going to do exactly what you tell me to. What you have shown me, and what I’d have realized, if I had stopped to think, is neither right nor just.”
Then Linda took her turn at deep thought.