“I can’t stop long,” she said. “I haven’t finished my Euclid lesson for Tuesday, and—”
“Oh, you must stop. Do stop and have tea with me, and never mind your conscience. You should really make an effort to get rid of that conscience of yours, Miss Miles; it must be awfully in your way!” Bridget said with an air of concern.
Miss Miles regarded her with a puzzled frown.
She was a dumpy little woman, with a broad round face, near-sighted eyes, and a pursed-up mouth. She wore square-toed boots, which her rather short skirt displayed to great advantage. There was no collar band on her somewhat infantile gathered bodice. It was finished at the neck by a turned-over piece of white lace, which revealed too much of a thick-set neck to be quite becoming.
“But a conscience is a great safeguard,” she began, in a tentative, uncertain fashion.
“What is there to be saved from?” inquired Bridget, recklessly, with a shrug of the shoulders. “There isn’t much chance for the devil in our lives, I’m afraid. I wish there was. It would at least be exciting to yield to temptation! Did I say yield? I meant, of course, to resist. How stupid of me! Resist,—yes, resist, that’s the right word; but the two things are so much alike, that one confuses the words sometimes.”
Miss Miles seemed a little dazed.
“I don’t understand,” she urged. “How can to resist temptation be like yielding?”
“The same thing by a different name, you know! One’s a short cut to the other; but I don’t know which,” Bridget said. “And now let us talk of something else,” she added hastily.
“But we haven’t talked at all yet,” Miss Miles protested, still preserving her earnest, serious expression.