“I have often been puzzled by that,” said Rachel.  “I seem to be always making mistakes about women, and perhaps that is the reason.  They show themselves capable of some deep affection or some great self-sacrifice, and I respect and admire them, and think they are like that all through.  And the day comes when they are not quite straightforward, or are guilty of some petty meanness, which a man who is not fit to black their boots would never stoop to.”

Hester’s eyes fixed on her friend.

“Do you tell them?  Do you show them up to themselves,” she asked, “or do you leave them?”

“I do neither,” said Rachel.  “I treat them just the same as before.”

“Then aren’t you a hypocrite, too?”

Hester’s small face was set like a flint.

“I think not,” said Rachel, tranquilly, “any more than they are.  The good is there for certain, and the evil is there for certain.  Why should I take most notice of the evil, which is just the part which will be rubbed out of them presently, while the good will remain?”

“I think Rachel is right,” said the Bishop.

“I don’t think she is, at all,” said Hester, her plumage ruffled, administering her contradiction right and left to her two best friends like a sharp peck from a wren.  “I think we ought to believe the best of people until they prove themselves unworthy, and then—­”

“Then what?” said the Bishop, settling himself in his chair.

“Then leave them in silence.”

“I only know of a woman’s silence by hearsay.  I have never met it.  Do you mean bitterly reproach the thistle for not bearing grapes?”

“I do not.  It is my own fault if I idealize a thistle until the thistle and I both think it is a vine.  But if people appear to love and honor certain truths which they know are everything to me, and claim kinship with me on that common ground, and then desert when the pinch comes, as it always does come, and act from worldly motives, then I know that they have never really cared for what they professed to love, that what I imagined to be a principle was only a subject of conversation—­and—­I withdraw.”

“You withdraw!” echoed the Bishop.  “This is terrible.”

“Just as I should,” continued Hester, “if I were in political life.  If a man threw in his lot with me, and then, when some means of worldly advancement seemed probable from the other side, deserted to it, I should not in consequence think him incapable of being a good husband and father and landlord.  But I should never again believe that he cared for what I had staked my all on.  And when he began to talk as if he cared (as they always do, as if nothing had happened) I should not show him up to himself.  I have tried that and it is no use.  I should—­”

“Denounce him as an apostate?” suggested the Bishop.

“No.  He should be to me thenceforward as a heathen.”

“Thrice miserable man!”