Her friend stares at her with aghast, wide-open grey eyes, as of one who sees a hideous blighting transformation taking place in a dear and familiar object.
“You are right!” she says, under her breath. “I thought him completely unworthy of you, so unworthy that your loss would cause him very little pain so long as he could keep, as you say, his ‘old lace and his Elzevirs;’ while in another direction I saw, or thought I saw, a possibility——” Her voice dies falteringly away.
Lavinia looks at her stoically. “You need not distress yourself; you have neither made nor marred in the matter.”
Another grim silence.
“Will you empower me to tell Rupert?”
“Tell him what?”
“Will you tell him yourself?”
“Tell him what? There is nothing to tell.”
The rector’s wife pauses, brought up against this wall of senseless brazen denial; her thin sensitive face even whiter than its white wont; but she is not easily baffled, nor apt to abandon a task because it wrings her withers.
“My dear,” she says, taking gently hold of the girl’s coldly pendant hand, and using an endearment uncommon to her, being one sparing of banal caresses, “do you think that you are doing Rupert a kindness in providing him with a wife who avoids his look, winces at his voice, and shudders at his touch?”