“Martha, Martha,” said Polly, reprovingly. “You have that worst type of mind—if it can be called a mind—that labours a point until it breaks. Everything that I have said to you is perfectly true, but if you pick the whole of it to pieces you will find that none of the bits match, and that none of them are alike on both sides. Character study is not a science—it is an art; and you have to keep one eye closed very often while you work.”
“Anyhow,” I said, “to return to the original subject, Octavia Sinclair. What are you going to say to her?”
“Tell her not to be an ass,” said Polly.
“Is that your best way of making her understand that you ‘love her still the same?’” I inquired.
“Well, I don’t love her the same when she is an ass,” said Polly. “She was a duck when I loved her first. I tell her not to be an ass, because I can’t love her under that disguise. When she stops being an ass she will become a duck again—at least, I hope so—and if she is the same duck I shall find a nice pond for her in my heart; not necessarily the same pond, because that may be filled up by now—I forget—but one quite as good as the old, if not better. And if she has any sense, she will get out of it sometimes and walk about on the grass by herself.”
“I shall go home and write a chapter on ‘Fidelity,’” I warned her.
“It is not fidelity to your friends to put them into books,” she said severely.
“It is not worse than putting them into embroidery-frames,” I answered snappishly, “and then luring them into that monster hotel of yours, where you even forget their numbers, and don’t answer their bells.”
“Never mind, don’t let’s quarrel,” said Polly. “You repeat in your book what I say to you in confidence——”
“Not at all,” I assured her; “I am merely assimilating other people’s ideas in the elegant way you described just now as being the habit of women, and when they emerge again you won’t know your own. They will have taken life in an entirely original shape. I can’t spin new stuff out of nothing, as you say your husband does——”