“She is nothing but a baby,” said Mrs. Forest. “The count has certainly a right to choose his acquaintances. My dear, I fear you did a very unwise thing”—thrown away your chances, she would have said, if she had expressed her thought exactly. Leila was puzzled. This was a new phase of her mother’s character, or new, at least, to her, and she replied, a little sourly, “Of course he has a right to choose his acquaintances; but supposing he had been riding with the child’s mother? Why, I should have felt insulted if he had recognized me.”
“Oh, now you are merely foolish. He would not do such a thing.”
“Why not? The child is no better than the mother, is she?” Mrs. Forest assumed an icy silence.
Linnie, to whom her sister soon conveyed the intelligence of the meeting in the park, took a very different ground. “You did right, sis,” she said; “for if you had accepted the invitation against your sense of propriety, he would have read your mind like a book, and despised you for it, as he will now, no doubt, for your airs.”
“Well, that’s a comforting dilemma, I must say.”
“I don’t care, Leila. The truth is, Susie was not treated well, nor Clara either. I like Susie. I’ve been there, lately, ever so many times, though you needn’t tell mamma.”
“Goodness me! I thought so. You’re infected with the Forest radicalism too. I wonder what you’ll come to?”
“A sensible person, I think. I mean to. I would not have refused to ride with the count. I should respect any one he chose to honor. Now you are smitten with him; you can’t deny it. But I can tell you one thing: he’s just as radical as papa is.”
“Well, men don’t like radical women for wives. They never choose them; and if they do, they don’t like them long.”
“You mean Clara. Now, Miss Wisdom, I’ll give you a little file to gnaw: There are three Forest girls in the market, or will be when Dr. Delano gets his divorce; and if either of the three ever becomes the Countess Von Frauenstein, it will not be the least radical one.”