“Really, I can’t say whether they were ideas or not. She knew what Every Other Week was; she had read the stories in it; but I’m not sure she valued it at its true worth. She is very plain-minded.”
“Don’t keep repeating that! What do you mean by plain-minded?”
“Well, honest, single, common-sense, coherent, arithmetical.”
“Horrors! Do you mean that she is mannish?”
“No, not mannish. And yet she gave me the notion that, when it came to companionship, she would be just as well satisfied with a lot of girls as young men.”
Mrs. March pulled her hand out of my arm, and stopped short under one of those tall Saratoga shade-trees to dramatise her inference. “Then she is the slyest of all possible pusses! Did she give you the notion that she would be just as well satisfied with you as with a young man!”
“She couldn’t deceive me so far as that, my dear.”
“Very well; I shall take her in hand myself to-morrow, and find out what she really is.”
Mrs. March went shopping the next forenoon with what was left of the Deering party; Deering had taken the early train north, and she seemed to have found the ladies livelier without him. She formed the impression from their more joyous behaviour that he kept his wife from spending as much money as she would naturally have done, and that, while he was not perhaps exactly selfish, he was forgetful of her youth, of the difference in years between them, and of her capacity for pleasures which he could not care for. She said that Mrs. Deering and Miss Gage now acted like two girls together, and, if anything, Miss Gage seemed the elder of the two.
“And what did you decide about her?” I inquired.