Volume Two—Chapter Twenty Two.
Aunt Marguerite makes Plans.
“I could not—I could not. A wife should accept her husband, proud of him, proud of herself, the gift she gives him with her love; and I should have been his disgrace. Impossible! How could I have ever looked him bravely in the face? I should have felt that he must recall the past, and repented when it was too late.”
So mused Louise Vine as she sat trying to work that same evening after a wearisome meal, at which Aunt Marguerite had taken her place to rouse them from their despondent state. So she expressed it, and the result had been painful in the extreme.
Aunt Marguerite’s remedy was change, and she proposed that they should all go for a tour to the south of France.
“Don’t shake your head, George,” she said. “You are not a common person. The lower classes—the uneducated of course—go on nursing their troubles, but it is a duty with people of our position to suffer and be strong. So put the trouble behind us, and show a brave face to the world. You hear this, Louise?”
“Yes, aunt,” said Louise, sadly.
“Then pray listen to it as if you took some interest in what I said, and meant to profit by it, child.”
Louise murmured something suggestive of a promise to profit by her aunt’s wisdom, and the old lady turned to her brother.