For a moment she could not think what he was referring to.
"Oh no!" she said at last, with wide-open eyes of wonder. "How could I? They don't come into my world at all. Neither their opinion of me, nor their want of manners, can possibly affect me."
"That is certainly the sensible way to look at it."
"I don't know, after all, whether it is the right way. Probably their vulgarity is all on the surface. I believe there are thousands of girls like that who only want some large-souled woman to take them by the hand, and draw out their own womanhood. How can they help it if their life has been barren of ideals?"
He made a mental survey of the women in the neighbourhood, in search of some one capable of performing such a function.
"What a pity it is that they cannot see you as you are," he said, looking at the dim outline of her face. "Large-souled women do not grow on every hedge."
"Perhaps it would be more to the purpose if I could see myself as they see me," she answered thoughtfully. "After all, with the honestest intentions, we scan our lives as we do our own poetry, laying stress on the right syllables, and passing lightly over a halting foot. You force me to confess that I said some very ill-natured things about those girls after they were gone; and I had not their excuse of being still in the chrysalis stage. They may make better butterflies than I yet. Even a woman can never tell how a girl is going to turn out."
He laughed. "What is bred in the bone—" he said, "Their mother is my ideal of all that is vulgar and pretentious."
"Poor children!" said Mona.
"And the best of it is," he said, "that she began life as a small——"