"I often wonder," pursued the old lady innocently, "what such a sweet, gay, lovely girl could see in a fellow like poor Clarence Breckenridge!"
"Great marvel she doesn't throw him over!" Warren said casually.
"It distresses me to hear you talk so recklessly, my son," Mrs. Gregory said after a brief pause,
"Lord, Mother," her son presently observed impatiently, "is it reasonable to expect that because a girl like that makes a mistake when she is twenty or twenty-one, that she shall pay for it for the rest of her life?"
"Unfortunately, we are not left in any doubt about it," the old lady said dryly. And as Warren was silent she went on with quavering vigor: "It is not for us to judge her husband's infirmities. She is his wife."
"Oh, well, there's no use arguing it," the man said pleasantly after a sulphurous interval. "Fortunately for her, most people don't feel as you do."
"You surely don't think that _I_ originated this theory?" his mother asked quietly after a silence, during which her long needles moved a little more swiftly than was natural.
"I don't think anything about it. I KNOW that you're much, much narrower about such things than your religion or any religion gives you any right to be," Warren asserted hotly. "It is nothing to me, but I hate this smug parcelling out of other people's affairs," he went on. "Mrs. Breckenridge is a very wonderful and a most unfortunate woman; her husband isn't fit to lace her shoes--"
"All that may be true," his mother interrupted with some agitation.
"All that may be true, you say! And yet if Rachael left him, and tried to find happiness somewhere else--"