“Don't you believe it. Her flightiness and insincerity are ingrain! I believed in her once myself—she had such beguiling ways, it was hard to disapprove of anything she said or did. But I was secretly aware, all the time, that there was a radical defect in her composition. A woman who has been engaged, or as good as engaged, to six or eight different men, cannot retain much purity of mind or strength of affection. I heard you tell her yourself once that such unscrupulous flirtation and bandying of hearts were profane touches that rubbed the down from the peach.”
“That was the extravagant talk of a silly, romantic girl,” replied Mabel, with a smile that changed to a sigh before the sentence was finished. “I was somewhat given to lecturing other people, in those days, upon subjects of which I knew little or nothing. Nine men out of ten care little how roughly the peach has been rubbed, provided the flavor is not injured to their taste. It is only once in a great while that you meet with one whose palate is so nice that he can detect the difference between fruit that has been hawked through the market and that just picked from the tree. First love is a myth at which rational people laugh.”
“Perhaps so,” said Mrs. Sutton dubiously.
In view of the circumstances of Mabel's marriage, she felt that it behooved her to be circumspect in condemnation of transferred affections.
“But that does not alter the fact of Rosa Tazewell's infamous behavior to Alfred Branch and others of her beaux. Isn't the poor fellow drinking himself into his grave, all through his disappointment? And here she is going to be as honored a wife as if she had never perjured herself, or ruined an honest, loving man's prospects for life!”
Mabel went on with her work, and did not reply.
“I have had uncomfortable suspicions about certain passages in her intercourse with us, since I heard this news,” continued Mrs. Sutton, edging her chair toward her niece, and dropping her voice. “I am afraid I can date the beginning of her cruelty to Alfred back to that September she spent here—to the latter part of it, I mean. Little scenes come to my memory that caused me trifling uneasiness then. I shall never forget, for instance, how she eyed you, the morning Winston came home so unexpectedly.”
And she described the incident recorded in the latter part of our opening chapter.
“Can it be,” she pursued, “that she had even then designs upon the man she is about to marry? She knew all the circumstances of the trouble that ensued, and if disposed to be meddlesome, she had the means at her command.”
“I told her nothing,” said Mabel briefly.