"Oh, Mrs. Carnby!" said Margery, laughing in spite of herself. "Can't you see that, much as I am afraid of Paris for my own sake, I'm more afraid of it for his?"
"My dear," said Mrs. Carnby, with a change of tone, "nowadays one's forced to take rather a liberal view of things. There are only a few delusions left, and love's not one of them—more's the pity! The best flowers, Margery—and I grant you love is one of the very best—are brought to perfection by methods which it's not always pleasant to follow in detail. There's a deal of hacking and pruning and fertilizing and cross-breeding with ignobler growths to be gone through with before one obtains a satisfactory result. It's like the most inviting dishes served up by one's chef: if we had the dangerous curiosity to pry into all the stages of their preparation, I doubt if very many of them would stand the test and prove so tempting, after all. That's the way with a man. When he brings us his love, we have to accept it, without inquiring too closely how it has come to be. You won't think me vain if I say all men can't be Jeremy Carnbys? When they know how to love, more often than not it's because they've learned; and as to how they learned, it's for our own good not to be too inquisitive. Usually, my dear, it means another woman, and not a woman one would be apt to call upon, at that."
"Mrs. Carnby!"
"Yes. Don't be provincial, Margery. I've no patience with the whitewash business. It's better at all times to look things squarely in the face, even if doing so makes—er—your eyes water! There's hardly a woman happily married to-day who hasn't been preceded, and rather profitably preceded, I venture to say, by another woman—and not a very good woman either. She's there in the background, but we have to ignore her, and by the time we notice her at all it's more than likely she has ceased to be important. She's been the method of preparing the dish, that's all, the fertilizer which has made the rose of love possible. She has taught the man what neither you nor any girl in the least like you could teach him—the things which are not worth while! We get the better part. She has burned up the chaff. We get the wheat."
Margery had tightly locked her hands.
"Fairy godmother," she said, "you don't want me to believe that, do you? You don't want me to be only the whim of a man's changed fancy, the thing on which he practises all he has learned from—from—"
"I would to Heaven I could make a man fit for you!" answered Mrs. Carnby, drawing the girl close to her, "but, since I can't do that, I want you to see things in their true light, and to learn that charity begins in the same place which is called a woman's sphere, and that love, from her standpoint, is little more than forgiveness on the endless instalment plan!"
"But Andrew—" said Margery eagerly.
"Andrew Vane is only a man," said Mrs. Carnby sententiously. "He can't be made out a seraph even by the fact that you—er—"