"Did Jeff write you he didn't want to be pardoned? He did us." "No. He hasn't written me for years." She looked a baffling number of things now, voluntarily pathetic, a little scornful, as if she washed her hands gladly of the whole affair. "Farvie thinks," said Lydia recklessly, "that you haven't written to him." "How could I?" asked Esther, in a quick rebuttal which actually had a convincing sound, "when he didn't write to me?" "But he was in prison." "He hasn't had everything to bear," said Esther, rising and putting some figurines right on the mantel where they seemed to be right enough before. "Do you know any woman whose life has been ruined as mine has? Have you ever met one? Now have you?" "Farvie's life is ruined," said Lydia incisively. "Jeff's life is ruined, too. I don't know whether it's any worse for a woman than for a man." "Jeffrey," said Esther, "is taking the consequences of his own act." "You don't mean to tell me you think he was to blame?" Lydia said, in a low tone charged with her own complexity of sentiment. She was horror-stricken chiefly. Esther saw that, and looked at her in a large amaze. "You don't mean to tell me you think he wasn't?" she countered. "Why, of course he wasn't!" Lydia's cheeks were flaming. She was impatiently conscious of this heat and her excited breath. But she had entered the fray, and there was no returning. "Then who was guilty?" Esther asked it almost triumphantly, as if the point of proving herself right were more to her than the innocence of Jeff. "That's for us to find out," said Lydia. She looked like the apostle of a holy war. "But if you could find out, why haven't you done it before? Why have you waited all these years?" "Partly because we weren't grown up, Anne and I. And even when we were, when we'd begun to think about it, we were giving dancing lessons, to help out. You know Farvie put almost every cent he had into paying the creditors, and then it was only a drop in the bucket. And besides Jeff pleaded guilty, and he kept writing Farvie to let it all stand as it was, and somehow, we were so sorry for Jeff we couldn't help feeling he'd got to have his way. Even if he wanted to sacrifice himself he ought to be allowed to, because he couldn't have his way about anything else. At least, that was what Anne and I felt. We've talked it over a lot. We've hardly talked of anything else. And we think Farvie feels so, too." "You speak as if it were a sum of money he'd stolen out of a drawer," said Esther. Her cheeks were red, like exquisite roses. "It wasn't a sum of money. I read it all over in the paper the other day. He had stockholders' money, and he plunged, it said, just before the panic. He invested other people's money in the wrong things, and then, it said, he tried to realise." "I can't help it," said Lydia doggedly. "He wasn't guilty." "Why should he have said he was guilty?" Esther put this to her with her unchanged air of triumphant cruelty.