"What ails you, Dora dear?" Annie sat up and asked sleepily. "What is the matter? It can't be, no," rousing herself, "it can not be—you don't mean that you repent what you've done, and would swallow the shop, foxy hair, and everything?"
"Oh, no," denied Dora, "but I didn't think a man would care like that; such a queer, gray shade came over his face, though I durst hardly look at him; and his hands which were—well, were holding mine for a second, you know——"
"No, I don't know," interrupted Annie, smiling to herself; "but go on, what about the hands?"
"They were as cold as ice."
"Very likely, it is only the month of April."
"And it is not above a year since he lost both his father and mother—all the near relations he had."
"Poor man!" admitted Annie. "But you could not help that, and many men, young men especially, seem to get on quite well without near relations."
There was a strain of hardness about pretty Annie, whether bred of that cynicism in the air of which May had complained, whether it was an integral part of Annie, or whether, as in the case of some valuable kinds of timber, it was merely an indication of the closer grain, the slower ripening, and the greater power of endurance of the moral fibre.
"Men are not like women." Annie was continuing her lecture. "I dare say Tom Robinson will do very well—all the better, perhaps, because he has no ambition, and is content to make money in the most humdrum way as a tradesman."
Dora sat up in turn, like a white ghost in her place in her little bed, seen by the dim light. She had the instinct which causes women to look back upon the men who have made love or proposed to them, even though the women have rejected the men—as in a sense their property, if not their prey, so as not by any means to relish the men's depreciation at the hands of other women. Then it becomes a point of honour alike with the proudest and the meekest of her sex to stand up in his absence in defence of the discarded swain.