It was a bitter loss to Minnie. She drove Frankie to the station that
last day with her heart like lead. And though she had voluntarily let
her go, and said good-by to her steadily and cheerfully, her very real
affection for her sister was hurt beyond remedy. She never again felt
quite the same toward her, never lost that faint resentment; always
remembered that Frances had wanted to go off and leave her, alone and
lonely.
The house was dreadful when she re-entered it. She cried all day as she
did her work, and went to sleep in miserable solitude. Oh, but she
missed Frankie, the brilliant, the lovely, the ardent! And the more she
missed her, the more deeply did she feel the wrong Frankie had done her.
Life had become unsupportable. She thought all the time of some way in
which she could change it, a way which should, of course, satisfy her
conscience.
For Minnie’s was a conscience which imperiously required satisfaction.
She had always to feel sure that she was “doing right.” However, as she
was always certain that all her aims were beyond reproach, her
conscience never refused to sanction whatever means she employed in
arriving at them.
She was more than a Jesuit. She did not so much believe that bad means
were justified by a worthy end; she was simply convinced that no means
used by her were, or could possibly be, bad.
Remorse and regret were unknown to her. And defeat, too, she had not as
yet encountered. From her earliest years she had known how to get her
own way. Either a serious manner made any request seem reasonable, or,
if this failed, thoughtful consideration had always showed her a way to
victory.
And yet, for all her crookedness and her muddle-headedness, and her
fierce and ridiculous ruthlessness, wasn’t there something about Minnie
that was really sublime? When you look at her whole life, in all its
preposterousness, can you really say whether or not she was good? Or
bad? Or perhaps was not either good or bad, but elemental and innocent,
even in harm, like a force of nature?
She bent her mind now upon her problem, surveyed her situation from
every angle. Useless to deny that she considered Mr. Petersen. She
turned him over and over in her mind, and, not without deep study,
rejected him. He absolutely would not do. She couldn’t be Mrs. Petersen.
Although he had never asked her, never mentioned the subject at all.
She was quite determined to marry someone, though, and to marry soon.
She couldn’t see any other end to her miseries and her loneliness. She
realised that under the present circumstances she was not at all likely
to meet anyone marriageable; she could not, like Frankie, roam the world
to find a man; she had to use more subtle and more difficult means. And,
actually, alone and unaided, the indomitable little thing thought of a
way----