“No, I don’t say she threw herself on your mercy,” his mother said, finally. “She needn’t have told you anything.”
“Except for the reason she gave--that she couldn’t make a start for herself till she had done so. And she has got her own way to make; she is poor. Of course, you may say her motive was an obsession, and not a reason.”
“There’s reality in it, whatever it is; it’s a genuine motive,” Mrs. Verrian conceded.
“I think so,” Verrian said, in a voice which he tried to keep from sounding too grateful.
Apparently his mother did not find it so. She asked, “What had been the matter with her, did she say?”
“In her long sickness? Oh! A nervous fever of some sort.”
Verrian reluctantly admitted, “She said it made her want to die. I don’t suppose we can quite realize--”
“We needn’t believe everything she said to realize that she suffered. But girls exaggerate their sufferings. I suppose you told her not to think of it any more?”
Verrian gave an odd laugh. “Well, not unconditionally. I tried to give her my point of view. And I stipulated that she should tell Jerusha Brown all about it, and keep her from having a nervous fever, too.”
“That was right. You must see that even cowardice couldn’t excuse her selfishness in letting that girl take all the chances.”
“And I’m afraid I was not very unselfish myself in my stipulations,” Verrian said, with another laugh. “I think that I wanted to stand well with the postmaster.”
There was a note of cynical ease in this which Mrs. Verrian found morally some octaves lower than the pitch of her son’s habitual seriousness in what concerned himself, but she could not make it a censure to him. “And you were able to reassure her, so that she needn’t think of it any more?”
“What would you have wished me to do?” he returned, dryly. “Don’t you think she had suffered enough?”
“Oh, in this sort of thing it doesn’t seem the question of suffering. If there’s wrong done the penalty doesn’t right it.”
The notion struck Verrian’s artistic sense. “That’s true. That would make the ‘donnee’ of a strong story. Or a play. It’s a drama of fate. It’s Greek. But I thought we lived under another dispensation.”
“Will she try to get more of the kind of thing she was doing for Mrs. Westangle at once? Or has she some people?”