“No—not really. She’s really quite harmless most of the time, but she has times when she is dangerous.”
“She’s very good-looking.”
“Always good-looking—always amusing—and she’s had on the whole a raw deal.”
“Jim,” Horatia spoke warmly out of the gathering darkness, “what is it about you and Mrs. Hubbell? Who is she?”
He hesitated and for a moment Horatia thought with a little fear that he was going to evade her question. But he began to speak quietly.
“Mrs. Hubbell, Horatia, is just a woman—not much more than that. She didn’t live here until after her marriage, and I met her through her husband, who was one of my best friends. He met her somewhere out West and married her and he was one of the most tremendously—tremendously in love persons that I ever saw. He was absolutely swayed by all that daintiness and delicateness that you saw this afternoon.
“After they had been married about a year or so she began to see a good deal of other men than Jack. I was there a good deal—so were lots of others. It was a pleasant place to go and none of us realized that Jack was jealous—except perhaps Rose—I don’t know. Anyway, he got hold of a fool letter that I wrote”—he stopped and Horatia was ashamed of her curiosity and passionately eager to gratify it further.
“The letter didn’t mean anything at all. But Jack came to ask me—to accuse me of inconceivable outrages towards him. I denied them, of course, but he was crazy—he wouldn’t believe me—and he sued Rose for a divorce and named me. Of course for her sake I should have fought it through and I think I could have cleared up Jack’s mind as well as the situation, but three weeks later Jack killed himself. The thing that gave the affair so much publicity was his suicide.
“It left his wife and me in a rotten unjustified situation. But for his sake we decided to let the matter drop. There was nothing on our consciences and she was very game. She said she didn’t care to clear her skirts by dragging poor Jack’s feeling into publicity after he was dead. And that he had paid the biggest price. Of course I had really, however innocently, created the situation, so I felt more cut up than I can ever tell you. So we let the matter drop and people thought what they liked.”
Horatia was quiet. They walked along under the darkened trees for a long way in silence.