“Certainly it would,” said her lawyer, nervously. “Not the least in your character.” Some misfortune of accent caught the lady’s ear and she rounded on him quickly.
“What is my character, Judge Hollaby?” she demanded.
Perhaps it was the oysters, perhaps it was Seneca on old age, perhaps it was a sign of old age itself; at any rate, the justice’s mind could not leap gracefully into the breach thus torn in his defences.
“Your character, Miss Smiley?” He tried to express a sense of shock by his intonation.
“I am not loved, I suspect,” Miss Smiley said, ignoring his palpable distress. “I think it very likely there are those who hate me. But if I am not respected in the community it is time I knew it. I am honest and I deal uprightly. I don’t write slanderous letters, like Maria Brand; I don’t cheat, like Jane Horton; I don’t try to improve everybody like that uncommon nuisance of an Errily woman. Nor do I countenance a disgraceful husband, as Amelia Dayton does. You will say that I talk like a Pharisee, ‘holier than thou’ and so forth. Judge Hollaby, if there were more Pharisees it would be a better world! A precious lot of men and women can only walk straight when it’s to outshine their neighbours who are walking crooked!”
Gradually recovering, the lawyer heard Miss Smiley saying:
“I’m not here to preach a sermon, but to get information and some advice. The advice I may take and I may not; the information I’ll certainly take if I can get it out of you.”
She reverted to Keturah Hawkins’s will. “I can do as I please absolutely with the property?”
“Unquestionably. But whatever you leave goes to your brother, if he survives you, and to his children, if he has any, in the event he predeceases you.”
“Predeceases!” snorted Miss Smiley, thrusting her hands in her pockets. “What a word! That applies only to the property my aunt left?”