“If you’d seen her, if you’d heard her, this morning,” said Miss Cotton, “you wouldn’t say that, Mrs. Brinkley.”

Mrs. Brinkley refused this with an impatient gesture.  “It isn’t what she is now, or seems to be, or thinks she is.  It’s what she’s going to finally harden into—­what’s going to be her prevailing character.  Now Dan Mavering has just the faults that will make such a girl think her own defects are virtues, because they’re so different.  I tell you Alice Pasmer has neither the head nor the heart to appreciate the goodness, the loveliness, of a fellow like Dan Mavering.”

“I think she feels his sweetness fully,” urged Miss Cotton.  “But she couldn’t endure his uncertainty.  With her the truth is first of all things.”

“Then she’s a little goose.  If she had the sense to know it, she would know that he might delay and temporise and beat about the bush, but he would be true when it was necessary.  I haven’t the least doubt in the world but that poor fellow was going on in perfect security, because he felt that it would be so easy for him to give up, and supposed it would be just as easy for her.  I don’t suppose he had a misgiving, and it must have come upon him like a thunder-clap.”

“Don’t you think,” timidly suggested Miss Cotton, “that truth is the first essential in marriage?”

“Of course it is.  And if this girl was worthy of Dan Mavering, if she were capable of loving him or anybody else unselfishly, she would have felt his truth even if she couldn’t have seen it.  I believe this minute that that manoeuvring, humbugging mother of hers is a better woman, a kinder woman, than she is.”

“Alice says her mother took his part,” said Miss Cotton, with a sigh.  “She took your view of it.”

“She’s a sensible woman.  But I hope she won’t be able to get him into her toils again,” continued Mrs. Brinkley, recurring to the conventional estimate of Mrs. Pasmer.

“I can’t help feeling—­believing—­that they’ll come together somehow still,” murmured Miss Cotton.  It seemed to her that she had all along wished this; and she tried to remember if what she had said to comfort Alice might be construed as adverse to a reconciliation.

“I hope they won’t, then,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “for they couldn’t help being unhappy together, with their temperaments.  There’s one thing, Miss Cotton, that’s more essential in marriage than Miss Pasmer’s instantaneous honesty, and that’s patience.”

“Patience with wrong?” demanded Miss Cotton.

“Yes, even with wrong; but I meant patience with each other.  Marriage is a perpetual pardon, concession, surrender; it’s an everlasting giving up; that’s the divine thing about it; and that’s just what Miss Passer could never conceive of, because she is self-righteous and conceited and unyielding.  She would make him miserable.”