Hephzy was silent for a moment. Then she said: “Why not?”
“You know why. That night when I first met her, the night after you had gone to Lucerne, she told me that if I persisted in following her and trying to see her I would force her to give up the only means of earning a living she had been able to find. Well, I have forced her to do that. She has been obliged to run away once more in order to get rid of us. I am not going to persecute her further. I am going to try and be unselfish and decent, if I can. Now that we know she is safe and among friends—”
“Friends! A healthy lot of friends they are—that Solomon Cripps and his wife! If ever I ran afoul of a sanctimonious pair of hypocrites they're the pair. Oh, they were sweet and buttery enough to us, I give in, but that was because they thought we was goin' to hire their Dump or Chump, or whatever 'twas. I'll bet they could be hard as nails to anybody they had under their thumbs. Whenever I see a woman or a man with a mouth that shuts up like a crack in a plate, the way theirs do, it takes more than Scriptur' texts from that mouth to make me believe it won't bite when it has the chance. Safe! poor Little Frank may be safe enough at Leatherhead, but I'll bet she's miserable. WHAT made her go there?”
“Because she had no other place to go, I suppose,” I said. “And there, among her relatives, she thought she would be free from our persecution.”
“There's some things worse than persecution,” Hephzy declared; “and, so far as that goes, there are different kinds of persecution. But what makes those Crippses willin' to take her in and look after her is what I can't understand. They MAY be generous and forgivin' and kind, but, if they are, then I miss my guess. The whole business is awful queer. Tell me all about your talk with Doctor Bayliss, Hosy. What did he say? And how did he look when he said it?”
I told her, repeating our conversation word for word, as near as I could remember it. She listened intently and when I had finished there was an odd expression on her face.
“Humph!” she exclaimed. “He seemed surprised to think you weren't goin' to Leatherhead, you say?”
“Yes. At least I thought he was surprised. He knew I had chased her from Mayberry to Paris and was there at the hotel trying to learn from him where she was. And he knows you are her aunt. I suppose he thought it strange that we were not going to follow her any further.”
“Maybe so... maybe so. But why did he call you a—what was it?—a silly donkey?”
“Because I am one, I imagine,” I answered, bitterly. “It's my natural state. I was born one.”