"
"She can't do any good, and it will keep her awake at nights. I object
altogether."
However, Mrs. Roughsedge, having first dropped a pacifying kiss on her
husband's gray hair, went up-stairs to put on her things, declaring that
she was going there and then to Beechcote.
The doctor was left to ponder over the gossip in question, and what
Diana could possibly do to meet it. Poor child!--was she never to be
free from scandal and publicity?
As to the couple of people involved--Fred Birch and that odious young
woman Miss Fanny Merton--he did not care in the least what happened to
them. And he could not see, for the life of him, why Diana should care
either. But of course she would. In her ridiculous way, she would think
she had some kind of responsibility, just because the girl's mother and
her mother happened to have been brought up in the same nursery.
"A plague on Socialist vicars, and a plague on dear good women!" thought
the doctor, knocking out his pipe. "What with philanthropy and this
delicate altruism that takes the life out of women, the world becomes a
kind of impenetrable jungle, in which everybody's business is
intertwined with everybody else's, and there is nobody left with
primitive brutality enough to hew a way through! And those of us that
might lead a decent life on this ill-arranged planet are all crippled
and hamstrung by what we call unselfishness.
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