Jim would have expected that if Kedzie were guilty of any spiritual
corruption it would show on her face. People will look for such
things. But she was still young and pretty and ingenuous and seemed
incapable of duplicity. And indeed such treachery was no more
than a childish turning from one toy to another. The traitors and
traitresses have no more sense of obligation than a child feels
for a discarded doll.
Jim paid Charity the uncomfortable compliment of feeling enough at
home with her to say, "Well, Charity, that little wife of mine takes
to the English nobility like a duck seeing its first pond, eh?"
"She seems to be quite at her ease," was all that Charity could
say. Now she felt herself a sharer in the wretched intrigue,
as treacherous as Kedzie, no better friend than Kedzie was wife,
because with a word she could have told Jim what he ought to have
known, what he was almost the only person in the room that did
not know. Yet her jaw locked and her tongue balked at the mere
thought of telling him. She protected Kedzie, and not Jim; felt
it abominable, but could not brave the telling.
She resolved that she would rather brave the ocean and get back
to Europe where there were things she could do.
The support of all the French orphans she had adopted had made
deep inroads in her income, but her conscience felt the deeper
inroads of neglected duty.
It was like Charity to believe that she had sinned heinously when
she had simply neglected an opportunity for self-sacrifice.
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