"Well, she was the attacking party. You were only on the defensive, and you knocked her down with the truth. Of course you would remember the kind of things she said to you more than she would remember your replies; and then you are much finer and more sensitive than she, anyway. But I will allow that she has turned out better in the end than I would have expected. That telling you what her father said wasn't bad. But, Hope dear, sensitive as you are, how could you recall yourself and that old time to her?"
"I told you how I came to do it; it was because she had got it into her head that it was you who had made me stiff and offish, and I had to tell her then just how it was."
"Oh, yes; and you sacrificed yourself in that way for me. You hated to tell her, Hope, I know you did,—you are such a sensitive, shrinking creature."
"Yes, that is just my fault,—a cowardly shrinking, that makes me keep silent sometimes when I ought to speak. Oh, Kate, Kate, I dare say now, this minute, you are thinking how strange it is,—my not having spoken to you before, of all this old life of mine, when I lived so differently from the way I live now. I dare say you think I—I was ashamed to talk about it, because my father was a working-man, a poor locomotive engineer. Oh, I shall never forget how I felt that day last term when you talked about the people who kept still and never spoke of their humble beginnings; and when you brought up the Stephensons and said, 'Do you think they'd keep still, because they were ashamed of their humble beginnings, after they had worked out of them and become prosperous?' and then when you went on and declared how you hated the cowardice of those people who didn't dare to speak of these things, and what you would do under such circumstances, I felt that I was the most miserable coward, and that you would despise me forever if you knew what I was keeping to myself. But I knew—I knew all the time, that I wasn't ashamed of anything,—of the little home without a servant or of the engine-cab and my dear, dear father. I knew I was proud of him and what he had done, and yet I knew that I couldn't bear to think of telling all these things to girls who had never known what it was to live as we had. I felt that you wouldn't, that you couldn't understand; that you would take it all something as Dorothea had, years ago, though you wouldn't say a word of how you felt, but you would look it. You would stare at me with wonder and curiosity,—that you—you—"
"Oh, Hope, Hope, my dear, I do understand it all—all—everything. I know that you couldn't be ashamed of that old time, and I understand just how you felt about us, how and why you shrank from telling us. One such experience as that with Dorothea was enough to make you shrink from all girls like us. You were a dear delicate little child, and you had never known that there was such ignorance as Dorothea's, and that you could be so misunderstood, and it has made a great bruise on you that you have never got over. Oh, Hope, this is all Dorothea's doing. She meant no harm, but she has done the harm nevertheless, for she has taken away your belief and trust and confidence. To think that you couldn't trust me, after all you've known of me, to understand just a difference in the way of living! Why, the life you've just told me of—that little home where you were so close to each other, where you lived so near to all your father's hopes and plans—seems to me beautiful, something to be envied. And to think you should think I shouldn't understand, shouldn't appreciate it—should look at it with—with such eyes as—as Dorothea's! Oh, Hope! Hope! doesn't this prove what harm Dorothea has done you?"
"And if it does, Kate, and I don't deny that it does, I say again that she didn't mean to do any harm,—I see that now as clear as can be,—and that ought to make all the difference; and then when I think what I have done—"
"You! what have you done but to forgive her ninety-and-nine times?"
"Oh, no, no, Kate, I've—I've dis—no, I've hated her all these years, and this hate has affected my manner towards her so much that it influenced you and all the other girls against her; and as she has been harmed through that, I don't see but that I ought to cry quits."
"Yes, five months against five years. Do you call that quits?"
"Yes, and maybe more than quits, because I've made enemies for her, or at least influenced people against her, while she had no feeling to prejudice people against me. She has liked me all this time that we've been here at school together, spite of my being so stiff; and when she came to find out who I was,—the little girl who got the best of her in that childish quarrel, she hadn't the least ill will towards me. Quits? Yes, I say it's more than quits for me. Oh, Kate, I can't tell you everything she said to me just now, but she did show herself generous and grateful; and even when I confessed that it was I who had prejudiced you, even then she had no ill will. Yes, yes, I agree that I was harmed and hurt by what happened five years ago; but, Kate, I've been thinking very fast and very hard for the last hour or two, and I've come to believe that if I had known nothing of Dorothea before she came here—if I and you had started without any prejudice, things might have been different, we might have been easier and pleasanter with her, and that might have brought her out in pleasanter ways. But instead of that, we picked up every little thing, and, well, she was cold-shouldered awfully by all of us at times; and we can't tell—we don't know what we might have done, if we had tried to make her one of us more. We might have kept her from doing such foolish reckless things as she has; and so, as I think that I am to blame for the beginning of this prejudice that has hurt her, I think that I may have been the means of doing her greater harm than she has ever done me; for think, think, Kate, what harm it must be to a girl to have Raymond Armitage able to boast about her accepting his attentions, and for your brother and Peter Van Loon, and nobody knows who else, getting such a cheap opinion of her through these things."