“Say it out, mother!” Verrian challenged her with a smile. “You’re not timid, anyway!”
“She had the courage to join in that letter, but not the courage to own her part in it. She was brave enough to confess that she had been sick of a nervous fever from the answer you wrote to the Brown girl, but she wouldn’t have been brave enough to confess anything at all if she had believed she would be physically or morally strong enough to keep it.”
“Perhaps nobody—nobody but you, mother—is brave in the right time and place.”
She knew that this was not meant in irony. “I am glad you say that, Philip.”
“It’s only your due. But aren’t you a little too hard upon cowards, at times? For the sort of person she is, if you infer the sort from the worst appearance she has made in the whole business, I think she has done pretty well.”
“Why had she left the Brown girl to take all your resentment alone for the last six or eight months?”
“She may have thought that she was getting her share of the punishment in the fever my resentment brought on?”
“Philip, do you really believe that her fever, if she had one, came from that?”
“I think she believes it, and there’s no doubt but she was badly scared.”
“Oh, there’s no doubt of that!”