"Isn't it disgusting?" he asked. "I don't see how Armiger could let them
do it. I hope to heaven she'll never see it!"
His mother looked up from the paragraph and asked,
"Why?"
"What would she think of me?"
"I don't know. She might have expected something of the kind."
"How expect something of the kind? Am I one of the self-advertisers?"
"Well, she must have realized that she was doing rather a bold thing."
"Bold?"
"Venturesome," Mrs. Verrian compromised to the kindling anger in her
son's eyes.
"I don't understand you, mother. I thought you agreed with me about the
writer of that letter--her sincerity, simplicity."
"Sincerity, yes. But simplicity--Philip, a thoroughly single-minded
girl never wrote that letter. You can't feel such a thing as I do.
A man couldn't. You can paint the character of women, and you do it
wonderfully--but, after all, you can't know them as a woman does."
"You talk," he answered, a little sulkily, "as if you knew some harm of
the girl."
"No, my son, I know nothing about her, except that she is not
single-minded, and there is no harm in not being single-minded. A great
many single-minded women are fools, and some double-minded women are
good."
"Well, single-minded or double-minded, if she is what she says she is,
what motive on earth could she have in writing to me except the motive
she gives? You don't deny that she tells the truth about herself?"
"Don't I say that she is sincere? But a girl doesn't always know her own
motives, or all of them.
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