“If he knows where I am, he will,” said Lady Harman.
“He’ll make a scandal. My dear! are you wise? Tell me, tell me exactly, why have you run away? I didn’t understand at all—that you had run away.”
“Because,” began Lady Harman and flushed hotly. “It was impossible,” she said.
Miss Alimony regarded her deeply. “I wonder,” she said.
“I feel,” said Lady Harman, “if I stayed, if I gave in——I mean after—after I had once—rebelled. Then I should just be—a wife—ruled, ordered——”
“It wasn’t your place to give in,” said Miss Alimony and added one of those parliament touches that creep more and more into feminine phraseology; “I agree to that—nemine contradicente. But—I wonder....”
She began a second cigarette and thought in profile again.
“I think, perhaps, I haven’t explained, clearly, how things are,” said Lady Harman, and commenced a rather more explicit statement of her case. She felt she had not conveyed and she wanted to convey to Miss Alimony that her rebellion was not simply a desire for personal freedom and autonomy, that she desired these things because she was becoming more and more aware of large affairs outside her home life in which she ought to be not simply interested but concerned, that she had been not merely watching the workings of the business that made her wealthy, but reading books about socialism, about social welfare that had stirred her profoundly.... “But he won’t even allow me to know of such things,” she said....
Miss Alimony listened a little abstractedly.
Suddenly she interrupted. “Tell me,” she said, “one thing.... I confess,” she explained, “I’ve no business to ask. But if I’m to advise——If my advice is to be worth anything....”