“It could not have swept him, if he had been firm! If he had been faithful to me, he could not have noticed any other woman in that way. I never noticed another man. I don’t understand it.”
Grizel sighed. The youthful arrogance of the girl was at once pitiful and menacing. To her there existed but the two hard lines, a right and a wrong, the maze of intersecting paths had no existence in her eyes. Her judgment, like that of all young untried things, was relentlessly hard.
Grizel sat looking at her, pondering what to say.
“When you first knew Cassandra you were fascinated by her. You felt a longing to see her again. Every time you saw her, you admired her more. You have told me about it, so often. In a feminine way you fell in love with her yourself, Teresa. You ought to understand.”
“He was engaged to me!” echoed Teresa obstinately. Suddenly her face quivered with pathos “And—I’m young—I’m pretty.—I loved him. Why? Why? Why?”
“Oh, my poor child!” Grizel cried sharply, and the tears started to her eyes. Poor, ignorant, complaisant Teresa fighting against the mysteries of life, demanding explanation of the inexplicable,—what tenderness, what forgiveness was to be expected from such an attitude?
“He chose me,” she insisted. “It was his own doing. Nobody made him. It was his own choice. And he had met her before he asked me. We used to talk about her together.—I was glad when he was enthusiastic... She was my friend, and a married woman with a husband and—that big boy! He is ten years old. She must be thirty at the least.” All the arrogance of the early twenties rang in Teresa’s voice. “It’s such folly—such madness! It isn’t as if she could ever—love him back.”
Silence. Teresa looked up sharply, held Grizel’s eyes in a hard, enquiring stare and deliberately repeated the pronouncement.
“It isn’t possible that she could care for him.”
“Did you find it so difficult, Teresa?”