“That poor woman! Her words haunt me! Perhaps, if she had not been left a widow, she would now be a respected and worthy member of society.”
Miss Latimer looked up surprised. Lucy, who was gazing into the fire, did not catch the expression, but went on—
“Did you have much talk with her? She came up from the kitchen crying. You had made an impression on her. But what will rouse her will? To-day she seemed to have no will—only wilfulness. And it was so awful to have to speak to a woman with white hair as I was obliged to speak to her—a woman who has been through trials and sorrows of which I know nothing.”
“I had some conversation with her,” said Miss Latimer. “She was inclined to be confidential. But what makes you think that, if her husband had lived, she would not have been as she is?”
“Because she said she got into the bad habit through living in loneliness and dulness with people who were inclined to be topers themselves,” answered Lucy. “One can understand how the temptation could come, and how gradually one might slide down too deeply at last to readily recover one’s footing.”
Miss Latimer looked puzzled and hesitated.
“But, my dear,” she said, “she told me that she first took to drinking because her husband was such a terrible drunkard and ill-used her so cruelly. She said to me, ‘Ah, m’m, you single ladies don’t know what misery is, and mustn’t be hard on them that do!’ Then she said she had kept straight for years because she lived with miserly old folks, who never had liquor in their house, and who lived two miles from any licensed premises. She said she thought she’d got such a mastery over herself that she might venture to take “a little support” through her Christmas cooking, but that the old craving came and re-enslaved her before she was aware.”
The two friends’ eyes met, and they looked at each other with the deprecatory, half-alarmed, half-shamed expression which always comes on honest faces at any new discovery of human duplicity.
“What is true? What is false?” wailed Lucy. “It seems to me that she adapted her stories to what she thought would best reach and touch you or me. True, sometimes the same story sounds differently when differently told and differently repeated. But I cannot see how these two versions can have the same original. This awful falseness, Miss Latimer, is even worse than the drunkenness.”
“My dear,” said the old lady, “it is the moral quagmire from which the drunkenness springs, and, therefore, is ‘worse’ just as a quagmire is ‘worse’ than any coarse weed which springs from it—being bound to bear such weeds, if not of one type, then of another.”