"How do you know Ally wouldn't have rather died if she could have chosen? She didn't want to fall in love with that young ass, Rickards. And I don't see what she did that was so very awful."
"She managed to let everybody else see, anyhow."
"What if she did? At least she was honest. She went straight for what she wanted. She didn't sneak and scheme to get him from any other girl. And she hadn't a mother to sneak and scheme for her. That's fifty times worse, yet it's done every day and nobody thinks anything of it."
She went on. "Nobody would have thought anything as it was, if Papa hadn't been such a frantic fool about it. It he'd had the pluck to stand by her, if he'd kept his head and laughed in their silly faces, instead of grizzling and growling and stampeding out of the parish as if poor Ally had disgraced him."
"Well—it isn't a very pleasant thing for the Vicar of the parish——"
"It wasn't a very pleasant thing for any of us. But it was beastly of him to go back on her like that. And the silliness of it! Caring so frightfully about what people think, and then going on so as to make them think it."
"Think what?"
"That she really had done something."
"Do you suppose they did?"
"Yes. You can't blame them. He couldn't have piled it on more if she had. It's enough to make her."