“As a matter of fact,” she remarked, “I thought that girl looked particularly sweet and pretty.”
Mrs. Marjoy glared and rattled the ribs of her umbrella. She always considered a difference of opinion as a personal affront. Only that morning she had declared to Dr. Marjoy that Mrs. Grace was a woman without strict convictions as to propriety, one of those flabby persons who never saw the glaring moral inconsistencies of others.
“I have suspected that man for a long while,” she now observed, with her usual sublime and eczematous hauteur. “Believe me, he is a most dissolute person.”
“Do you always base your conclusions on such slender evidence?” asked the lady from the antipodes.
“I never condemn others wantonly,” said the doctors wife. “I am a Christian.”
“And yet you say that a man is a rogue because you happen to see him walking alone with a woman whom you do not know.”
There was a scintillant and vindictive gleam in Mrs. Marjoy’s brown eyes. She pressed her lips into a tight line and prodded the turf with the point of her umbrella.
“I generally find that my inferences are correct,” she said.
“Indeed! I am glad to say we are more generous and healthy in the colonies.”