"Will you go to see her?" Amy asked, rather pointedly.
"Oh, I couldn't do that," replied Cora. "My family—you know,—or perhaps you don't know. I'm related to Mrs. Williams," she laughed.
"Oh!" Amy ejaculated, aghast, and newly fascinated by the horror, what somehow seemed the impossibleness of the whole thing—that she should be talking of Ruth Holland to a woman related to Mrs. Williams!
"I suppose she felt terribly," Amy murmured.
Cora laughed a little. "Oh, I don't know. It never seemed to me that Marion would do much feeling. Feeling is so—ruffling."
"She looks," said Amy, a little aggressively, "as though she might not show all she feels."
"Oh, I suppose not," Cora agreed pleasantly. "Perhaps I do Marion an injustice. She may have suffered in silence. Certainly she's kept silence. Truth is, I never liked her so very well. I like Ruth much the better of the two. I like warmth—feeling."
She was leaning forward and looking from the window. "That's the Hollands'," she said. And under her breath, compassionately, she murmured, "Poor Ruth!"
"I should think you would go and see her," said Amy, curiously resentful of this feeling.
With a little sigh Cora leaned back in the luxurious corner. "We're not free to do what we might like to do in this life," she said, looking gravely at Amy and speaking as one actuated by something larger than personal feeling. "Too many people are associated with me for me to go and see Ruth—as, for my own part, I'd gladly do. You see it's even closer than being related to Marion. Cyrus Holland,—Ruth's brother—married into my family too. Funny, isn't it?" she laughed at Amy's stare. "Yes, Cyrus Holland married a second cousin of Stuart Williams' wife."