“Only nineteen!” cried Bell. “Why, I always thought that she was old as the hills—twenty-five or thirty at the very least. She always seemed tired of things.”
“Well,” said Laura, in a whisper intended to be too low to reach Mrs. Winship’s tent, “I don’t know whether I ought to repeat what was told me in confidence, but the fact is—well—she doesn’t like Mr. Pinkerton very well!”
The other girls, who had not enjoyed the advantages of city life and travel, looked as dazed as any scandalmonger could have desired.
“Don’t like him!” gasped Polly, nearly falling off the stump. “Why, she’s married to him!”
“Where on earth were you brought up?” snapped Laura. “What difference does that make? She can’t help it if she doesn’t happen to like her husband, can she? You can’t make yourself like anybody, can you?”
“Well, did she ever like him?” asked Margery; “for she’s only been married a year or two, and it seems to me it might have lasted that long if there was anything to begin on.”
“But,” whispered Laura, mysteriously, “you see Mr. Pinkerton was very rich and the Dentons very poor. Mr. Denton had just died, leaving them nothing at all to live on, and poor Jessie would have had to teach school, or some dreadful thing like that. The thought of it almost killed her, she is so sensitive and so refined. She never told me so in so many words, but I am sure she married Mr. Pinkerton to save her mother from poverty; and I pity her from the bottom of my heart.”
“I suppose it was noble,” said Bell, in a puzzled tone, “if she couldn’t think of any other way, but—”
“Well, did she try very hard to think of other ways?” asked Polly. “She never looked especially noble to me. I thought she seemed like a die-away, frizzlygig kind of a girl.”
“I wish, Miss Oliver, that you would be kind enough to remember that Mrs. Pinkerton is one of my most intimate friends,” said Laura, sharply. “And I do wish, also, that you wouldn’t talk loud enough to be heard all through the cañon.”