"
"She has no right," declared Grizel, "to wait until she is sure, if
she does not care for him. If she fears that he is falling in love
with her, she knows how to discourage him; there are surely a hundred
easy, kind ways of doing that."
"Fears he is falling in love with her!" Tommy repeated. "Is any woman
ever afraid of that?"
He really bewildered her. "No woman would like it," Grizel answered
promptly for them all, because she would not have liked it. "She must
see that it would result only in pain to him."
"Still----" said Tommy.
"Oh, but how dense you are!" she said, in surprise. "Don't you
understand that she would stop him, though it were for no better
reasons than selfish ones? Consider her shame if, in thinking it over
afterwards, she saw that she might have stopped him sooner! Why," she
cried, with a sudden smile, "it is in your book! You say: 'Every
maiden carries secretly in her heart an idea of love so pure and
sacred that, if by any act she is once false to that conception, her
punishment is that she never dares to look at it again.' And this is
one of the acts you mean."
"I had not thought of it, though," he said humbly. He was never
prouder of Grizel than at that moment.
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