“There certainly wasn't a sympathy, I'm happy to say,” retorted Mrs. Brinkley. “I know her, and I know her family, root and branch. The Pasmers are the dullest and most selfish people in the world.”
“Oh, I don't think that's her character,” said Miss Cotton, ruffling her feathers defensively.
“Neither do I. She has no fixed character. No girl has. Nobody has. We all have twenty different characters—more characters than gowns—and we put them on and take them off just as often for different occasions. I know you think each person is permanently this or that; but my experience is that half the time they're the other thing.”
“Then why,” said Miss Cotton, winking hard, as some weak people do when they thick they are making a point, “do you say that Alice is dull and selfish?”
“I don't—not always, or not simply so. That's the character of the Pasmer blood, but it's crossed with twenty different currents in her; and from some body that the Pasmer dulness and selfishness must have driven mad she got a crazy streak of piety; and that's got mixed up in her again with a nonsensical ideal of duty; and everything she does she not only thinks is right, but she thinks it's religious, and she thinks it's unselfish.”
“If you'd seen her, if you'd heard her, this morning,” said Miss Cotton, “you wouldn't say that, Mrs. Brinkley.”
Mrs. Brinkley refused this with an impatient gesture. “It isn't what she is now, or seems to be, or thinks she is. It's what she's going to finally harden into—what's going to be her prevailing character. Now Dan Mavering has just the faults that will make such a girl think her own defects are virtues, because they're so different. I tell you Alice Pasmer has neither the head nor the heart to appreciate the goodness, the loveliness, of a fellow like Dan Mavering.”
“I think she feels his sweetness fully,” urged Miss Cotton. “But she couldn't endure his uncertainty. With her the truth is first of all things.”
“Then she's a little goose. If she had the sense to know it, she would know that he might delay and temporise and beat about the bush, but he would be true when it was necessary. I haven't the least doubt in the world but that poor fellow was going on in perfect security, because he felt that it would be so easy for him to give up, and supposed it would be just as easy for her. I don't suppose he had a misgiving, and it must have come upon him like a thunder-clap.”
“Don't you think,” timidly suggested Miss Cotton, “that truth is the first essential in marriage?”