seeing her.”
Delia sprang up in her turn, flushed and trembling.{119}
{119}
“Charlotte! Do you know what you’re insinuating?”
“Yes: I know.”
“But it’s too outrageous. No decent girl—”
The words died on Delia’s lips. Charlotte Lovell held her eyes inexorably. “Girls are not always what you call decent,” she declared.
Mrs. Ralston turned slowly back to her seat. Her tambour frame had fallen to the floor; she stooped heavily to pick it up. Charlotte’s gaunt figure hung over her, relentless as doom.
“I can’t imagine, Charlotte, what is gained by saying such things—even by hinting them. Surely you trust your own child.”
Charlotte laughed. “My mother trusted me,” she said.
“How dare you—how dare you?” Delia{120} began; but her eyes fell, and she felt a tremor of weakness in her throat.
{120}
“Oh, I dare anything for Tina, even to judging her as she is,” Tina’s mother murmured.
“As she is? She’s perfect!”
“Let us say then that she must pay for my imperfections. All I want is that she shouldn’t pay too heavily.”
Mrs. Ralston sat silent. It seemed to her that Charlotte spoke with the voice of all the dark destinies coiled under the safe surface of life; and that to such a voice there was no answer but an awed acquiescence.
“Poor Tina!” she breathed.
“Oh, I don’t intend that she shall suffer! It’s not for that that I’ve waited ... waited. Only I’ve made mistakes: mistakes that I understand now, and must{121} remedy. You’ve been too good to us—and we must
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