"How?"
"Boycotted him. We can't reach him any other way."
"That's rather hard on his wife, who seems to be a decent sort of party."
"The innocent often appear to suffer with and for the guilty, but if you understood the law of Karma you would know that all the evil that befalls us is really the result of some wrongdoing of our own in a previous incarnation. Mary Mason herself is an instance."
"What's the matter with her?"
"Poor girl! She's been knocked from pillar to post all her days. She hasn't an idea who her parents are, and there isn't a creature in the world she has any claim upon. She must have gone very far astray last time to have been brought into the world again with such disadvantages."
"It appears to me she has a great many advantages—lovely blue eyes, good teeth, the fashionable golden shade of hair, and the prettiest complexion I've seen for many a day."
"Don't be provoking, Dave! The poor little thing has the marks of some of her beatings on her yet. The Ferguson family were the first who ever treated her decently, or paid her any wages."
"Why did they drop her?"
"One of our Committee took it upon herself to write and ask them. They replied that the girl was of perfectly good character, so far as they knew, but she fell so ridiculously in love with Frank Ferguson, their eldest son, that she was making a nuisance of herself, and so they had to let her go."