Mrs. Leslie surveyed the girl's flushed anger with sarcastic pity. "Tut! tut! More fibs. Huddled over that stove, you make the loveliest study of despair. You have been crying, too."
"I—I haven't!" The lines of Huddled Despair flowed into Radiant Anger.
"Your eyes are red?"
"Well, if they are—if I did—it was through anger."
Mrs. Leslie accepted the modified admission. "That's right, my dear. He—no man is worth the compliment of regretful tears. They are all foolish, selfish, fickle as children. They cry for love like a child for the moon, throw it away when the toy wearies, howl if another tries to pick it up. They only value the unattainable. Bah!"
The ejaculation was comical in its feigned disgust, but just then Helen had ears only for the serious or sympathetic—preferably the latter. "Tell me, Elinor," she asked, "do you really think I have deserved this at his hands?"
"No." For once in her life Mrs. Leslie dealt in undiluted truth—because, perhaps, lying would not serve her purpose. "One could understand his pique—" With incredible hardihood, considering the part she herself had played, she commented: "Really, my dear, you ought not to have done it. But he has been altogether too severe—unforgiving. I don't see how you stand it. I should freeze these cold nights without some one to warm my feet on."
"To think"—speech was such a relief after months of bitter silence, and Helen never even noticed the other's funny climax—"to think that this should be dealt to me by a man of whose very existence I was unconscious a short two years ago! Is he a god to exercise such power—to command me to eat the bread-and-water of affliction during his pleasure? Why, I was twenty-two before I ever saw him! Doesn't it seem ridiculous—silly as though one pebble on a beach were to establish limits for another? They roll and rub where and with whom they list, and why shouldn't I?" Ignoring the fact that monogamy was her sex's greatest achievement, and that the first woman who bartered love for protection, cookery for maintenance, had not driven such a bad bargain, she finished: "Wouldn't it be funny if pebbles were condemned to rub and roll in definite pairs till winds and waves had buried one or other affinity deep in the sands. Why—"
"In other words," Mrs. Leslie interrupted, "why should vertical distances count for more than horizontal—death for more than distance—seven feet under the sod carry advantages and opportunities that do not go with seventy miles above? There isn't any reason. It is just so."
"Well, I won't stand it!" Rebellion inhered in Helen's stamp. "I won't! I won't! I won't!"