She laughed again at the memory.
“Then I lectured him soundly. I began ’way back with the beginning,—his running around after people, his toadying, his literary ambitions, his self-importance. I talked to him about his treatment of you in Paris; he merely wanted to get rid of you decently. After that we discussed love. I used some of Erard’s psychology. He was after sensations merely, I told him—wanted to know how it would feel to kiss me. He would be awfully lugubrious afterwards, if I had snapped him up, and he had come to his senses to-morrow to find himself engaged to a poor girl twenty-five years old with no social pulls. I described to him how such a man ‘falls in love,’ and how he makes a grumbling, fault-finding husband. Oh! I taught him a lot!”
She laughed again. Mrs. Wilbur wished to laugh also, but restrained herself.
“I ended by giving him some good advice about himself. In the first place he must get some kind of principles, just for convenience. Now he doesn’t care about anything but the looks of things. And do you know what he said—he was very angry by this time! ‘Why, Miss Parker, you have a singular misconception of me. How could I have all the friends who surround me and how could I make so many influential connections in London, if I were the sort of man you describe?’ Actually, he said that. Your brother, Adela, is quite hopeless.”
“Was that all?”
“Yes, he was very, very angry, so mad he forgot to be hurt. It was the kindest way to send him off. He will go back to London to-morrow, pretty well cured of an infatuation, which, he assured me, had extended over five years.”
Mrs. Wilbur laughed this time without scruple. But after a time she said earnestly, “You might have done so much for him, Molly!”
Molly looked at her, with a trace of contempt in her smiling mouth. “Do you think that’s the right place for missionary endeavour, Adela?” An instant later she nestled up to her friend. “Forgive me, dear. I am horrid and heartless.”
The two shed a few tears. “We women never escape our affections,” Mrs. Wilbur remarked ruefully, thinking of the afternoon. “Men get along so much more easily.”
“I don’t want to escape!” Molly replied promptly, and then blushed.