Miss Cotton was so bewildered by Mrs. Brinkley’s interpretation of Alice’s latent motives that she let the truculent hostility of her aspiration pass unheeded.  She looked helplessly about, and seemed faint, so that Mrs. Brinkley, without appearing to notice her state, interposed the question of a little sherry.  When it had been brought, and Miss Cotton had sipped the glass that trembled in one hand while her emotion shattered a biscuit with the other, Mrs. Brinkley went on:  “I’m glad the engagement is broken, and I hope it will never be mended.  If what you tell me of her reason for breaking it is true—­”

“Oh, I feel so guilty for telling you!  I’d no right to!  Please never speak of it!” pleaded Miss Cotton.

“Then I feel more than ever that it was all a mistake, and that to help it on again would be a—­crime.”

Miss Cotton gave a small jump at the word, as if she had already committed the crime:  she had longed to do it.

“Yes; I mean to say that they are better parted than plighted.  If matches are made in heaven, I believe some of them are unmade there too.  They’re not adapted to each other; there’s too great a disparity.”

“You mean,” began Miss Cotton, from her prepossession of Alice’s superiority, “that she’s altogether his inferior, intellectually and morally.”

“Oh, I can’t admit that!” cried Miss Cotton, glad to have Mrs. Brinkley go too far, and plucking up courage from her excess.

“Intellectually and morally,” repeated Mrs. Brinkley, with the mounting conviction which ladies seem to get from mere persistence.  “I saw that girl at Campobello; I watched her.”

“I never felt that you did her justice!” cried Miss Cotton, with the valour of a hen-sparrow.  “There was an antipathy.”

“There certainly wasn’t a sympathy, I’m happy to say,” retorted Mrs. Brinkley.  “I know her, and I know her family, root and branch.  The Pasmers are the dullest and most selfish people in the world.”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s her character,” said Miss Cotton, ruffling her feathers defensively.

“Neither do I. She has no fixed character.  No girl has.  Nobody has.  We all have twenty different characters—­more characters than gowns—­and we put them on and take them off just as often for different occasions.  I know you think each person is permanently this or that; but my experience is that half the time they’re the other thing.”

“Then why,” said Miss Cotton, winking hard, as some weak people do when they thick they are making a point, “do you say that Alice is dull and selfish?”

“I don’t—­not always, or not simply so.  That’s the character of the Pasmer blood, but it’s crossed with twenty different currents in her; and from some body that the Pasmer dulness and selfishness must have driven mad she got a crazy streak of piety; and that’s got mixed up in her again with a nonsensical ideal of duty; and everything she does she not only thinks is right, but she thinks it’s religious, and she thinks it’s unselfish.”