“I can’t explain it to you,” said Mariposa. “I—I—didn’t want to go. That was all.”
“But you wanted to go only a month or two before, when Shackleton himself made you the offer?”
Mariposa nodded without answering.
“But why? That’s the part that’s so extraordinary. You’d take it from him, but not from his wife.”
“A person might change her mind, mightn’t she?”
“A fool might, but a reasonable woman, without a cent, with hardly a friend, how could she?”
“Well, she has.”
“Mariposa, look me in the eye.”
Mrs. Willers met the amber-clear eyes and saw, with an uneasy thrill, that there was knowledge in them there had not been before. It was not the limpid glance of the candid, unspoiled youth it had once been. She felt a contraction of pain at her heart, as though she had read the same change in Edna’s eyes.
“What made you change your mind?—that’s what I want to know.”