“Hilary! She said that!”
And that, you know, was all that she had said! Boy Fenwick had died “for purity.” That was all.
“It seems,” I couldn’t help thinking aloud, “very sweeping....”
It was, Hilary said grimly—and very pointed, in a girl not twenty!
“But!” I murmured.
Boy’s friends, Hilary said, could naturally put only one construction on it. Naturally, Hilary said. “For purity!” And Iris’s friends could put no other. What, after all, didn’t “for purity” mean? It could mean, to all the decent people of the world, but one thing....
Hilary looked at me in inquiry. I had made a noise. But I was so surprised. “You don’t mean,” I tried not to gasp, “that you condemn her on that for Boy Fenwick’s death!”
“One doesn’t,” snapped Hilary, “‘condemn’ an Iris March, an Iris Fenwick, an Iris Storm. They stand condemned in themselves. They are outside the law by which we——”
“Hilary, as the Girondins were put by the Jacobins!”
“We’re not perfect,” said Hilary quietly, “but we’re not that. What Iris was at nineteen or so—or before, evidently—she has been ever since.”