‘I needn’t remind you,’ fell from Nancy, after a moment of troubled reflection, ‘how careful you must be in talking about me to the Barmbys.’
‘Oh, don’t have the slightest fear.’
‘Weren’t you delirious in your illness?’
‘I should think I was indeed! For a long time.’
‘I hope you said nothing—’
‘About you? Oh, not a word; I’m quite sure. I talked all the time about my studies. The doctor heard me one day repeating a long bit of Virgil. And I kept calling for bits of paper to work out problems in Geometrical Progression. Just fancy! I don’t think most girls are delirious in that way. If I had said anything about you that sounded queer, of course mother would have told me afterwards. Oh, it was quite an intellectual delirium.’
Had Jessica, since her illness, become an insufferable simpleton? or—Nancy wondered—was it she herself who, through experience and sorrows, was grown wiser, and saw her friend in a new light? It troubled her gravely that the preservation of a secret more than ever momentous should depend upon a person with so little sense. The girl’s departure was a relief; but in the silence that followed upon silly talk, she had leisure to contemplate this risk, hitherto scarce taken into account. She spoke of it with Mary, the one friend to whom her heart went out in absolute trust, from whom she concealed but few of her thoughts, and whose moral worth, only understood since circumstances compelled her reliance upon it, had set before her a new ideal of life. Mary, she well knew, abhorred the deceit they were practising, and thought hard things of the man who made it a necessity; so it did not surprise her that the devoted woman showed no deep concern at a new danger.
‘It’s more the shame than anything else, that I fear now,’ said Nancy. ‘If I have to support myself and my child, I shall do it. How, I don’t know; but other women find a way, and I should. If he deserts me, I am not such a poor creature as to grieve on that account; I should despise him too much even to hate him. But the shame of it would be terrible. It’s common, vulgar cheating—such as you read of in the newspapers—such as people are punished for. I never thought of it in that way when he was here. Yet he felt it. He spoke of it like that, but I wouldn’t listen.’
Mary heard this with interest.
‘Did he wish you to give it up?’ she asked. ‘You never told me that.’