"Why not, Owen? Oh, I know she has been—well, you know where—but she is free again now; and it is very hard if one mistake is to dog her footsteps wherever she goes for the rest of her life."
"It was a pretty serious mistake," Owen reminded her quietly, "and to tell you the truth I hardly like you to go about so constantly with a woman who did what she was proved to have done."
"Oh, don't be such a Pharisee, Owen." Toni spoke sharply and Owen glanced at her in dismay. "I suppose someone has been saying something to you. But I don't intend to give up Eva Herrick to please a lot of spiteful old women like Lady Martin and Mrs. Madgwick."
"Certainly one or two people have commented on your friendship," said Owen thoughtfully, "and I'm bound to say I don't like it myself. To begin with Mrs. Herrick treats her husband abominably; and I should not have thought you would have been attracted by her shallow, futile way of talking."
"You forget I'm shallow and futile myself," said Toni with a faint, bitter smile. "The gossips of the neighbourhood have long since decided that I was an ignorant little fool who wasn't fit to be the mistress of Greenriver; and I suppose it's a case of birds of a feather, isn't it?"
"Toni!" Owen's voice expressed bewilderment. "What on earth do you mean? Who ever dared to say you weren't fit to be mistress of Greenriver?"
"Oh, heaps of people," said Toni recklessly. "You know quite well you were ashamed of me when we first went out to dinner parties here, and I didn't know how to behave—and lately we have been invited nowhere—not even to the Golf Club Ball."
Owen bit his lip. In truth the matter of the ball had puzzled him considerably. Although not a golfer, he was on friendly terms with many of the members of the local Club; and since Toni's friends, Mollie and Cynthia Teach, were ardent golfers, it had seemed most probable that Owen and his wife would receive an invitation to the annual ball.
The Tobies had indeed gone so far as to assure Toni of her invitation when first the ball was mentioned; and though as the day grew near the two girls grew uneasy when the topic was broached, Toni never dreamed that their avoidance of the subject covered a real and distressing awkwardness.
Certainly neither Toni nor Owen imagined that they had been quietly excluded from the list of guests; but such was the astounding fact, as Mollie and Cynthia were guiltily aware.