“I don’t believe I can imagine so much as that exactly, but I can imagine her being afraid of Miss Gage’s taking it out of her somehow. Now she will take it out of us. I hope you realise that you’ve done it now, my dear. To be sure, you will have all your life to repent of your rashness.” “I shall never repent,” Mrs. March retorted hardily. “It was the right thing, the only thing. We couldn’t have let that poor creature stay on, when she was so anxious to get back to her husband.” “No.” “And I confess, Basil, that I feel a little pity for that poor girl, too. It would have been cruel, it would have been fairly wicked, to let her go home so soon, and especially now.” “Oh! And I suppose that by _especially now_, you mean Kendricks,” I said, and I laughed mockingly, as the novelists say. “How sick I am of this stale old love-business between young people! We ought to know better—we’re old enough; at least _you_ are.” She seemed not to feel the gibe. “Why, Basil,” she asked dreamily, “haven’t you any romance left in you?” “Romance? Bah! It’s the most ridiculous unreality in the world. If you had so much sympathy for that stupid girl, in that poor woman in her anxiety about her disappointment, why hadn’t you a little for her sick husband? But a husband is nothing—when you have got him.” “I did sympathise with her.” “You didn’t say so.” “Well, she is only his second wife, and I don’t suppose it’s anything serious. Didn’t I really say anything to her?” “Not a word. It is curious,” I went on, “how we let this idiotic love-passion absorb us to the very last. It is wholly unimportant who marries who, or whether anybody marries at all. And yet we no sooner have the making of a love-affair within reach than we revert to the folly of our own youth, and abandon ourselves to it as if it were one of the great interests of life.” “Who is talking about love? It isn’t a question of that. It’s a question of making a girl have a pleasant time for a few days; and what is the harm of it? Girls have a dull enough time at the very best. My heart aches for them, and I shall never let a chance slip to help them, I don’t care what you say.” “Now, Isabel,” I returned, “don’t you be a humbug. This is a perfectly plain case, and you are going in for a very risky affair with your eyes open. You shall not pretend you’re not.” “Very well, then, if I am going into it with my eyes open, I shall look out that nothing happens.”