“How do you know that I don’t mind?” Tessa could not forbear asking.
“Oh, you wouldn’t be so happy and like to do things. I believe that I like Gerald a great deal better any way.”
She grew frightened at Tessa’s stillness; there was not one sympathetic line in the stern curving of her lips.
“Have you told Dr. Lake that?”
“You needn’t cut me in two,” laughed Sue uneasily, “men can’t sue women for breach of promise can they?”
“Answer me, please.”
Sue hesitated, colored, stammered, finally confessed in a weak voice that tried hard to be brave, “Yes, I have! There now! You can’t hurt me! Father said last night that if I had taken Lake he would have given me the house and every thing in it ‘for the old woman to keep house with,’ you know! And then he said that it was hard for me to leave him now that he is growing old, that he would have to marry somebody that wouldn’t care for him, that he never had had much pleasure in his life, that Gerald was a good physician and they could work together and how happy we might all have been! He was mad enough though when he first discovered that Gerald was in love with me; he threatened to send him off. But that’s his way! He is one thing one day and another thing the next! And I couldn’t help it, Tessa, I really, really couldn’t, but I was so homesick and just then Gerald came in—he looked so tired, his cough has come back, too—and when he said ‘How many days yet, Susan?’ I said quick, before I thought, ‘I like you a hundred times better! I would rather marry you than Stacey.’ And then he turned so white that I thought he was dead, and he said something, I don’t know whether it was swearing or praying—and caught me in his arms, and said after that he would never let me go! And then I said—I said—I couldn’t help it—that I would write to Stacey and send back the ring and he took it off and tossed it out the window! I And then I made him go and find it! Stacey can give it to some other girl. I didn’t hurt it. I always took it off when I swept or wet my hands. Life is so uncertain, I thought that he might want it again.”
“Life is uncertain. I never realized it until this minute.”
“Now your voice isn’t angry,” said poor Sue eagerly. “I want you to think that I have done right.”
“When my moral perceptions are blunted, I will.”