“Did you see how painfully she colored as she caught the glance you gave me, when he was attempting an account of Dr. H’s lecture? I could not help feeling for her.”
“I did not remark it,” replied Miss Gorham, “and I have no sympathy for a woman who has so little feeling or principle, I care not which, as to marry a man she despises. She probably does not feel for herself, and I do not know why we should put ourselves to the pain of feeling for her. I remember the time when Fanny Jones used to laugh at Tom Barton as much as either you or I.”
“So do I,” replied Mary. “She little thought then she would ever have him.”
“But finding she could get nobody better, she has thought it as well to marry him, and that is what you call falling in love, Mary.”
“Not at all,” rejoined her friend warmly. “But remember it is three years since Mr. Barton first addressed Fanny, and although she ridiculed him then, she has become attached to him since. His devotion and constancy have really won her.”
“If then she is in love with him,” said Sarah, “she should be satisfied with him; and if she is not she should not have married him; so arrange it any way you will, Mary, I do not see that she is deserving of much pity. If she fancies he has grown wiser during the last three years, so much the better for her; and if she knows he has not, so much the worse. Either way I have no sympathy to bestow upon her, Mary.”
“Well, I have,” replied Mary. “I always pity a sensible person who does a silly thing. It is laying up themselves such a store of suffering for the future.”
“’Pon my word, Mary, you amuse me,” said Sarah, laughing. “Now I might possibly feel for a fool who was committing a folly, as I would for a blind man who walked into the fire, but as to wasting my compassion on those who do such things with their eyes open, is really more than I can undertake. But then,” she continued, half contemptuously, “I have not your stock of sensibilities to go upon, and consequently, perhaps, do well to economize mine, or I certainly should exhaust them before they were called upon for a really deserving object.”
“I consider all suffering as deserving pity,” replied Mary quietly.
“That is more than I do,” returned Sarah with spirit. “Sin and suffering may go together, but I do not consider them equally deserving of compassion, or I should go to the jails and work-houses to bestow my sympathies.”