“I’m sure in these days, with so much materialism about and such wickedness everywhere, when everybody who has a soul seems trying to lose it, to find any one who hadn’t a soul and who is trying to find one——”
“But is she trying to get one?”
“Mr. Flange comes twice every week. He would come oftener, as you know, if there wasn’t so much confirmation about.”
“And when he comes he sits and touches her hand if he can, and he talks in his lowest voice, and she sits and smiles—she almost laughs outright at the things he says.”
“Because he has to win his way with her. Surely Mr. Flange may do what he can to make religion attractive?”
“I don’t believe she believes she will get a soul. I don’t believe she wants one a bit.”
She turned towards the door as if she had done.
Mrs. Bunting’s pink was now permanent. She had brought up a son and two daughters, and besides she had brought down a husband to “My dear, how was I to know?” and when it was necessary to be firm—even with Adeline Glendower—she knew how to be firm just as well as anybody.
“My dear,” she began in her very firmest quiet manner, “I am positive you misjudge Miss Waters. Trivial she may be—on the surface at any rate. Perhaps she laughs and makes fun a little. There are different ways of looking at things. But I am sure that at bottom she is just as serious, just as grave, as—any one. You judge her hastily. I am sure if you knew her better—as I do——”
Mrs. Bunting left an eloquent pause.