"Why don't you settle for yourself?" cried the doctor, testily. "That is the way you women flatter the pride of these priests!"
"Not at all. You make him talk nonsense; I find him a fount of wisdom."
"I admit he knows some moral theology," said Roughsedge, thoughtfully. "He has thought a good deal about 'sins' and 'sin.' Well, what was his view about these particular 'sinners'?"
"He thinks Diana ought to know."
"She can't do any good, and it will keep her awake at nights. I object altogether."
However, Mrs. Roughsedge, having first dropped a pacifying kiss on her husband's gray hair, went up-stairs to put on her things, declaring that she was going there and then to Beechcote.
The doctor was left to ponder over the gossip in question, and what Diana could possibly do to meet it. Poor child!--was she never to be free from scandal and publicity?
As to the couple of people involved--Fred Birch and that odious young woman Miss Fanny Merton--he did not care in the least what happened to them. And he could not see, for the life of him, why Diana should care either. But of course she would. In her ridiculous way, she would think she had some kind of responsibility, just because the girl's mother and her mother happened to have been brought up in the same nursery.
"A plague on Socialist vicars, and a plague on dear good women!" thought the doctor, knocking out his pipe. "What with philanthropy and this delicate altruism that takes the life out of women, the world becomes a kind of impenetrable jungle, in which everybody's business is intertwined with everybody else's, and there is nobody left with primitive brutality enough to hew a way through! And those of us that might lead a decent life on this ill-arranged planet are all crippled and hamstrung by what we call unselfishness." The doctor vigorously replenished his pipe. "I vow I will go to Greece next spring, and leave Patricia behind!"
Meanwhile, Mrs. Roughsedge walked to Beechcote--in meditation. The facts she pondered were these, to put them as shortly as possible. Fred Birch was fast becoming the mauvais sujet of the district. His practice was said to be gone, his money affairs were in a desperate condition, and his mother and sister had already taken refuge with relations. He had had recourse to the time-honored expedients of his type: betting on horses and on stocks with other people's money. It was said that he had kept on the safe side of the law; but one or two incidents in his career had emerged to light quite recently, which had led all the scrupulous in Dunscombe to close their doors upon him; and as he had no means of bribing the unscrupulous, he had now become a mere object-lesson for babes as to the advantages of honesty.