Of course this pathetically false opinion made it impossible for her to realize that jealousy is just a form of self-love, nor could she enlarge upon Edith's naïve generalization and say that, if a woman suffers because she is not the equal of the rival who gains her lover's love—that is not jealousy! It is the anguish of recognizing her own defects, and it may be very noble. If she suffers because the rival is her inferior, that is not jealousy; it is the anguish of recognizing defects in her lover, and it, too, is noble, for she is unhappy, not because he has slighted her, but because he has slighted himself! Jealousy has no such noble elements; it is the unhappiness that Bingo knows—an ignoble agony! ... But Eleanor, like many pitiful wives, did not know this. Sitting there on the bank of the river, without aspiration for herself or regret for Maurice, she knew only the anguish of being neglected. "He wouldn't have left me six years ago," she said; "He doesn't even ask me if I want to wade! I don't; but he didn't ask me. He just went off with her!"
Suddenly, her fingers trembling, she began to take off her shoes and stockings. She would do what Edith did! ... It was a tremor of aspiration!—an effort to develop in herself a quality he liked in Edith. She went, barefooted, with wincing cautiousness, and with Bingo stepping gingerly along beside her, across the mowed grass; then, haltingly, down the bank to the sandy edge of the river; there, while the little dog looked up at her anxiously, she dipped a white, uncertain foot into the water—and as she hesitated to essay the yielding mud, and the slimy things under the stones, she heard the returning splash of wading feet. A minute later the three youngsters appeared, Edith's skirts now very well above the danger line of wetness, and the two men offering eager guiding hands, which were entirely disdained! Then as, from under the leaning trees, they rounded the bend, there came an astonished chorus:
"Why, look at Eleanor!"
"Your skirt's in the water," Edith warned her; "hitch it up, and 'come on in—the water's fine!'"
She shook her head, and turned to climb up the bank.
"'The King of France,'" Edith quoted, satirically, "'marched down a hill, and then marched up again!'"
Eleanor was silent. When the three began to put on their shoes and stockings, Eleanor, putting on her own, her skirt wet and drabbled about her ankles, heard Maurice and Johnny offering to tie Edith's shoestrings—a task which Edith, with condescending giggles, permitted. Both of the boys—for Maurice seemed suddenly as much of a boy as Johnny!—went on their knees to tie, and re-tie, the brown ribbons, Maurice with gleeful and ridiculous deference.
"Want me to tie your shoestrings for you, Nelly?" he said over his shoulder.
"I am capable of tying my own, thank you," she said, so icily that the three playfellows looked at one another and Maurice, reddening sharply, said:
"Give us a song, Nelly!" But she sitting with clenched hands and tensely silent, shook her head. She was too wounded to speak. For the rest of the poor little picnic, with its gathering up of fragments and burning paper napkins—the conversation was labored and conscious.