“You’re crazy!” Lena cried. “I _live_ on music!”
“No, you don’t,” he said. “You keep yourself woozy with it. You go on music debauches, Lena. You don’t take it as an art; you take it as an excitement. You keep your emotions frothing with it, and that’s why you can’t get along without it. If you hadn’t been in the habit of getting yourself woozy with music, that Venable affair would never have happened.”
“George!” she said sharply, and her eyes, already angry, grew more brilliant with increased emotion. “Shame on you!”
“It’s a thing you have no right to make me remember.”
“Other people remember it,” he said, with a brother’s grimness. “You needn’t think because nobody outside the family ever speaks of it to you it isn’t thought of and referred to when you’re spoken _of_.”
She looked pathetic at this, and reproached him in a broken voice. “Unmanly! One would think my own—my own brother——”
“Your own brother is about the only person that _could_ speak of it to you in a friendly way, Lena. You know how the rest of the family speak of it to you—when they do.”
“It’s so unfair!” she moaned. “Nobody ever understood——”
“We needn’t to go into that,” George said gently. “I think myself it was your musical emotions on top of a constitutional lack of discretion. Oh, I don’t blame you! I’ve spent too much time trying to cover my own indiscretions from the family. I’m really more the family black sheep than you are, only you had worse luck; that’s all. I only mention it to get you to think a little before you talk of throwing Dan Oliphant over rather than to go and live in the town he’s so proud of.”
She wiped her eyes, choked a little, and protested feebly: “But the two things haven’t any connection. What—what’s Venable got to do with——”
“Well, you make me say it,” George remarked as she paused. “I think you understand as well as I do; but if you want me to be definite, I will.”
“How can I be anything else? There isn’t any tactful way to say some things, Lena. You may get proposals from some of these men you meet at parties and father don’t know about——”
“Never mind, please, George. Do you have to be quite so——”
“Yes,” he said decisively. “Quite. The family have made it clear what they’ll do, if you ever try again to marry one of the wrong sort, like Venable.”