“How could I put any questions on such a thing? How could it be discussed between him and me? To think of it is bad enough, but to speak of it—mamma! How do I know, even, what words to say?”
“In that case, every engagement would be at the mercy of any slanderer, if the girl never could bring herself to ask what it meant.”
“I am not any girl,” cried poor Bee, with a quiver of her lip. “I am just myself. I don’t think very much of myself any more than you do, but I can’t change myself. Oh, let me alone, let me alone, mamma!”
Mrs. Kingsward was very much excited. Her nostrils grew pinched and dilated in the struggle for breath; her lips were open and panting from the same cause. She was caught in that dreadful contradiction of sentiment and feeling which is worse than any unmingled catastrophe. She had been rent asunder before this by her desire to shield her daughter, yet the sense of her duty to her husband remained, and now it was the correspondence which she seemed to be called upon to defend almost at peril of her life; that actually clandestine, at least secret correspondence, of which she could not approve, which she was bound to cut short. And yet to cut it short like this was something which she could not bear. She threw aside the work with which she had been struggling and fixed her eyes on Bee, who did not look at her nor see how agitated her expression was.
“If you can do this, I can’t,” she said. “I will write to him. The other dreadful story may be true, for anything I know. And that, of course, is enough. But this one I don’t believe, if an angel from Heaven told it me. He shall at least have the chance of clearing himself!”
“I don’t know,” said Bee, “what the other dreadful story was. I thought it was only pretending to love—some other woman; and then—pretending to love me”—she broke off into a little hoarse laugh. The offence of it was more than Bee could bear. The insult—to suffer (she said to herself) was one thing—but to be insulted! She laughed to think what a fool she had been; how she had been taken in; how she had said—oh, like the veriest credulous fool—“Till death.”
“He was not pretending to love you. What went before I know not, but with you he was true.”
“One before—and one after,” said Bee, rising in an irrepressible rage of indignation. “Oh, mamma, how can we sit quietly and discuss it, as if—as if it were a thing that could be talked about? Am I to come in between—two others—two—— I think it will make me mad,” the girl cried, stamping her foot. How does a man dare to do that—to insult a girl—who never sought him nor heard of him, wanted nothing of him—till he came and forced himself into her life!”
“Oh! Bee, my darling,” cried the mother, going up to her child with outstretched arms.
“Don’t touch me, don’t touch me, don’t pet me; I cannot bear it. Let me stand by myself. I am not a little thing like Lucy to be caught up and kissed till I forget. I don’t want to forget. There is nothing that can ever be done to me, if I were to live to an hundred, to put this out of my head.”