"Oh," she said, "it isn't fair! I'm the one to blame; it isn't fair!"
The indignation in her voice made his heart leap. "Of course it isn't fair. But Elizabeth, I would pay any price to know that you were my wife." He tried to take her hand, but she pushed him aside and began to pace about the room.
"It isn't right!" she said; "she sha'n't treat you so!" She was almost like the old, furious Elizabeth in that gust of distress at her own responsibility for an injustice to him. But Blair dared to believe that her anger was for his sake, and to have her care that he should lose money made the loss almost welcome. He felt, through his rage at his mother, a thrill of purpose, a desire to amount to something, for Elizabeth's sake—which, if she could have known it, might have comforted Sarah Maitland, sitting in her dreary bedroom, her face hidden in her hands.
"Dearest, what do I care for her or her money?" he cried out; "I have you!"
Elizabeth was not listening to him; she was thinking what she could do to save him from his mother's displeasure. "I'll go and see her, and tell her it was my fault," she said to herself. She had a vague feeling that if she could soften Mrs. Maitland she and Blair would be quits.
She did not tell him of her purpose, but the mere having a purpose made her face alert, and it seemed to him that she identified herself with him and his interests. His eager denial of her self-accusation that she had injured him, his ardent impulse to protect her from any remorse, to take all the blame of a possible "mistake" on his own shoulders, brought an astonishing unselfishness into his face. But Elizabeth would not let him blame himself.
"It was all my fault," she insisted. "I was out of my head!"
At that he frowned sharply—"when you are eaten up with jealousy," his mother had said. Oh, he did not need his mother to tell him what jealousy meant: Elizabeth would not have married him if she had not been 'out of her head'! "She still thinks of him," he said to himself, as he had said many, many times in these two months of marriage—months of alternate ecstasies and angers, of hopes and despairs. As for her indignation at the way he had been treated, it meant nothing personal, after all. In his disappointment he went out of the room in hurt silence and left her to her thoughts of "him." This was the way most of their talks ended.
But Elizabeth's indignation did not end. In the next two days, while Mrs. Maitland was in Philadelphia making her naive offer to David, she brooded over the situation. "I won't have Blair punished for my sins," she said to herself; "I won't have it!" Her revolt at an injustice was a faint echo of her old violence. She had no one to talk to about it; Nannie was too shy to come to see her, and Miss White too tearful to be consulted. But she did not need advice; she knew what she must do. The afternoon following Mrs. Maitland's return from Philadelphia she went to see her. . . . She found Nannie in the parlor, sitting forlornly at her drawing-board. Nannie had heard, of course, from Blair, the details of that interview with his mother, and in her scared anger she planned many ways of "making Mamma nice to Blair," but she had not thought of Elizabeth's assistance. She took it for granted that Elizabeth would not have the courage to "face Mamma."
"I have come to see Mrs. Maitland," Elizabeth said. "Is she in the dining-room?"