"Oh," says Everard candidly, "I wear well before the world! But I don't mind telling you, Flo, that I was pretty well bowled over at first, raved like the victim of a melodrama, wanted to pursue the guilty pair, brain the bridegroom, et cætera. Fortunately a friend of sterner stuff than I am, who had also been tried by the fire, steadied me in time, and made me acknowledge that there is not a woman living worth the sigh of an honest man; and so I dried up."
"Not a woman living?" repeats Miss Wynyard, with an earnestness very foreign to that young person's tone in a ball-room or elsewhere. "Stuff, Jack, stuff! Loose statements of that kind do not patent your good sense or your cure, let me tell you. You were born of a woman, were you not—a woman whom, as well as I can remember, you loved, reverenced, and mourned—"
"Shut up, Flo," he says roughly, his face flushing; "I won't stand preaching from you! As if—as if I would compare my mother—"
"That's just the point, dear boy, I wish to lead you to. The memory of your mother ought to save you from falling into the deep cant, the twopenny cynicism of the jilted man who labels every woman worthless because he happens to be ill-used by an ambitious flirt. No, all women are not worthless; and there are many in the world too good for you, Jack—ay, too good for men ten times better than you. I know of one who once loved a man—Jack, are you listening? I am going to tell you a most interesting story."
He turns listlessly.
"Ay, Flo? A woman you once knew of, who loved a man. And what was her history?"
"'A blank, my lord; she never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud.
Feed on her damask cheek.'"
"More fool she! Was he well off?"
"But, being a little lady," continues Flo, needless of the interruption, "as proud, shy, sensitive, as she was loving, she did not, Viola-wise, sit, like Patience on a monument, smiling at grief, but moved among her fellow-men with placid unconcern and a heart-whole surface, did her duties bravely, took her pleasures as gayly as any other girl of her age, and even trained herself to smile in the face of the man she loved when the dolt was chanting the praises of another woman. Her mother even did not know her secret."
"And yet she confided in you! You must have a fund of sympathy in reserve somewhere, Flo, that I could never reach."