“But a peona! And you know her.”
“Yes, and I know him—better than you do. Now look here, my dear—” Followed a little lecture on the creature, Man, that showed she had profited by her married experience. “A man is a man and there’s no sense in trying to have him anything else. When a girl loves, she excludes, for the time at least, all others from her life. But a man—while he may love one girl with all his strength, he can still see beauty in others. Nature made him that way and we have simply got to stand for it. Now if Gordon had been ten years older, I’d have allowed you real reason. After thirty a man’s kisses mean something. But at Gordon’s age they are thistledown and light as air, belong to vanity rather than love. A young fellow is so proud of having kissed a pretty girl that he swells up like a turkey gobbler and struts in his self-esteem without thought for anything else. Then, you, yourself, are mostly to blame. Why—”
Next a little lecture on the sin of flirting, with appropriate personal applications which were, however, interrupted by the person. “You didn’t flirt with him, of course.”
“Goodness, child! don’t bite me! I couldn’t see the poor boy crushed into the face of the earth. Now listen.” After detailing Gordon’s confession, of the injured pride, anger, pique that he had tried to solace in Felicia’s smiles, she concluded, “But you—after driving him to desperation go and make the vital mistake of your life.”
“And you think that was the way of it? That he didn’t really mean anything?”
“Didn’t he tell me so himself?”
“Well—” she pondered, looking at the widow in the glass, then suddenly collapsed on the other’s warm shoulder. “Oh, I’m so glad! I—I hate him!”
The widow, being a woman, quite understood these contradictions. “Of course you do.” She gently fondled the fair head. “How much?”
The head rose in order to execute a vehement nod. “I hate him so much I—I could just kill any other girl that tried to take him!” With a wild sob the face burrowed again into the soft shoulder.
“Well, they’ll try, all right.”