"Of course," said Eleanor.
"No, sir!" said Edith. "You have a right to be unhappy. If the other fellow's nicer than you—I mean if he has something that attracts her that you haven't, of course you'd be unhappy! (though you could get busy and be nice yourself.) Or, if he's not as nice as you, you'd be unhappy, because you'd be so awfully disappointed in her. But there's no jealousy about that kind of thing! Jealousy is hogging all the love for yourself. Like Bingo! And I call it plain garden selfishness—and no sense, either, because you don't gain anything by it. Do you think you do, Maurice? ... For Heaven's sake, hand me the sandwiches!"
Maurice didn't express his thoughts; he just roared with laughter. Eleanor reddened; Johnny, handing the sandwiches, said that, though Edith generally could reason pretty well—for a woman—in this particular matter she was 'way off.
"You are long on logic, Edith," Maurice agreed; "but short on human nature; (she hasn't an idea how the shoe fits!)."
"The reason I'm so up on jealousy," Edith explained, complacently, "is because yesterday, in English Lit., our professor worked off a lot of quotations on us. Listen to this (only I can't say just exactly the words!): 'Though jealousy be produced by love, as ashes by fire, yet jealousy'—oh, what does come next? Oh yes; I know—'yet jealousy extinguishes love, as ashes smother flames.'"
"Who said that?" Maurice said.
Edith said she'd forgotten: "But I bet it's true. I'd simply hate a jealous person, no matter how much they loved me! Wouldn't you, Eleanor? Wouldn't you hate Maurice if he was jealous of you? I declare I don't see how you can be so fond of Bingo!"
Maurice, suddenly ashamed of himself for his pleasure in seeing Eleanor hit, was saying, inaudibly, "Good Lord! what will she say next?" To keep her quiet, he said, good-naturedly, "Don't you want to sing, Nelly?"
She said, very low, "No." Her throat ached with the pain of knowing that the one little contribution she could make to the occasion was not really wanted!
Maurice did not urge her. He and the other two took off their shoes and stockings; and went with squeals across the stubble, down a steep bank, to a pebbly point of sand, round which a sunny swirl of water chattered loudly, then went romping off into sparkling shallows. Edith's lifted skirt, as she stepped into the current, assured her against the wetting Eleanor had foreseen, and also showed her pretty legs—and Eleanor, on the bank, her tensely trembling hand cuddling Bingo against her knee, "guarded" her things! It was at this moment that her old, unrecognized envy of Youth turned into a perfectly recognizable fear of Age. Edith was a woman now, not a child! "And I—dislike her!" Eleanor said to herself. She sat there alone, thinking of Edith's defects—her big mouth, her bad manners, her loud voice; and as she thought,—watching the waders all the while with tear-blurred eyes until a turn in the current hid them—she felt this new dislike flowing in upon her: "He talks to her; and forgets all about me!" ... She was deeply hurt. "He says she has 'brains.' ... He doesn't mind it when she says she 'doesn't care for music,' which is rude to me! And she talks about jealousy! She knows I'm jealous. Any woman who loves her husband is jealous."