"
"Then why did he not tell us--tell me? Why did he place me in the very
awkward position of not knowing of this previous acquaintance of his
wife's? Why, in that very unpleasant conversation we had one day at
the Lodge, was I the only person to be kept in ignorance of his reasons--
and very good reasons I now see they were--for forbidding Sir Edwin's
visits? Singing duets together! Who knows but that they may meet
and sing them still? That new piano! and we turned out of the house
directly afterward--literally turned out! But perhaps that was the very
reason she did it--that she might meet him the more freely. Oh, Maria!
your poor deluded brother!"
It is strange the way some women have--men too, but especially
women--of rolling and rolling their small snowball of wrath until it
grows to an actual mountain, which has had dragged into it all sorts of
heterogeneous wrongs, and has grown harder and blacker day by day,
till no sun of loving-kindness will ever thaw it more. In vain did poor
Maria ejaculate her pathetic "Oh, Henrietta!" and try, in her feeble way,
to put in a kindly word or two; nothing availed. Miss Gascoigne had
lashed herself up into believing firmly every thing she had imagined
and it was with an honest expression of real grief and pain that she
repeated over and over again, "What ought we to do? Your poor, dear
brother!"
For, with all her faults, Miss Gascoigne was a conscientious woman;
one who, so far as she saw her duty, tried to fulfill it, and as strongly,
perhaps a little more so, insisted on other people's fulfilling theirs.
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