When Lary had gone, Mrs. Trench slipped in at the back door. She had
been waiting her turn. It was like the old Lavinia to know exactly
what she wanted. And again, it was like Lavinia to veil her request in
mystery and innuendo.
“I want to ask your advice. You know so much more about the ways of the
world than I do.” She drew from the pocket of her muslin dress a thick
letter. “Do you think there are any circumstances under which it would
be right for a married woman to receive--”
She was so naïve, Judith could with difficulty repress a smile.
“I write a good many letters to my attorney, Mr. Ramsay. He has a wife.”
“But those are business letters.”
“Not always. I write to him when I am blue or in doubt. His wife
detests letter-writing. She usually adds a postscript.”
“She sees the letters--and replies?”
“Why, to be sure. You mean, Mrs. Trench, the kind of letters a woman
could not show her husband? I’m afraid that is never quite safe.”
“I ignored the first--and the second. This one came on Friday. And then
the minister preached that sermon on regeneration through suffering.
He said it was our duty to help God to chastise the wayward soul.
This man ... the one who wrote to me....” She faltered, then went on
resolutely: “He is very unhappy. It is a man I met on the train--and
he fell in love with me. Of course I repulsed him. I told him what a
splendid husband I had. And in this letter he says that when I praised
David to him--on the train--it was all he could do to keep from
carrying me off bodily--it threw him into such a jealous rage. I ought
to be furious with him.” She stared into vacancy, adding slowly: “but
I’m not.”
This new Lavinia had suddenly come upon some bewildering apparition.
Her fingers twitched, and a yellow pallor drank up the flush in her
rounded cheeks. A chance acquaintance on a railroad train! Eileen might
have fallen beneath the glamour of such a romance. But for a woman of
Mrs. Trench’s age and temperament! It was unthinkable.
“Mrs. Ascott, tell me ... do people ever really get over things?”
All the fire of her being leaped to her eyes as she put the question,
leaving her face ghastly. It was as if her whole life hung on the
answer.
“Sorrow and disappointment? Oh, I am sure they do. And, my dear Mrs.
Trench, I wouldn’t lay too much stress on the infatuation of a man you
met in the Pullman. To write to him--letters you couldn’t show your
husband--might be followed by serious complications.”
“Don’t you think I have character--stability enough to--you won’t say
anything about this to Larimore?”
“Surely not.”
V
That evening David and Lavinia went out to sprinkle the vegetable
garden, their arms around each other’s waists, their attitude that of
a honeymoon pair. When the task was done they came to the summer house
for an hour’s visit. Not even Hal and Eileen, in the first fever of
their revealed engagement, were more frankly devoted than they. It
seemed to Judith, sitting with them, that the woman was the aggressor,
that she multiplied endearing terms and half-concealed caresses, to
assure herself that she truly felt what her lips were saying. For David
these manifestations were unnecessary. His whole being was a caress.