Annie got to the end with a single sentence:
“By the way, it may interest you—and I hope you won’t be annoyed at my mentioning it, and indeed you may very possibly have heard it already—to learn that everybody here seems to understand that Mr. Ansdell is shortly to marry your sister-inlaw, and he himself, speaking to me, referred to her in a way which amounted to a declaration of the fact.”
“Well, there you have it!” said Seth slowly, after a long pause in which husband and wife looked at each other. “That is news, isn’t it?”
“I should think so!” Annie spoke deliberately, too, turning the letter over with a meditative air. “I should think so!”
The gravity of his wife’s tone seemed to Seth to be more profound than the circumstances altogether demanded.
“I don’t know after all,” he said, in half-apology for his own earlier confession of gloom, “but that it would be a tolerable match. I don’t say that they would be happy in the sense that we are happy, my girl; but she has a great many qualities which would make her a helpful wife to an ambitious, successful, masterful sort of public man like Ansdell. Come, now, let’s be fair to her. Dent says that she is very popular in Washington.”
“Yes,” replied Annie thoughtfully, drawing her daughter closer to her breast, “she always will be popular with people who are not married to her. Such women are!”