She just opens her lips to me.  You remember Corporal Thwaites—­you caught his horse, when he had his foot near wrenched off, going through the gate—­and his way of breathing through the under-row of his teeth—­the poor creature was in such pain—­that’s just how she takes her breath.  It makes her look sometimes like that woman’s head with the snakes for her hair.  This bothers me—­how is it you and Mrs. Lovell manage to talk together of such things?  Why, two men rather hang their heads a bit.  My notion is, that women—­ ladies, in especial, ought never to hear of sad things of this sort.  Of course, I mean, if they do, it cannot harm them.  It only upsets me.  Why are ladies less particular than girls in Rhoda’s place?”

     ("Shame being a virtue,” was Mrs. Lovell’s running comment.)

“She comes up to town with her father to-morrow.  The farm is ruined.  The poor old man had to ask me for a loan to pay the journey.  Luckily, Rhoda has saved enough with her pennies and two- pences.  Ever since I left the farm, it has been in the hands of an old donkey here, who has worked it his own way.  What is in the ground will stop there, and may as well.

“I leave off writing, I write such stuff; and if I go on writing to you, I shall be putting these things ’ -!—!—!’ The way you write about Mrs. Lovell, convinces me you are not in my scrape, or else gentlemen are just as different from their inferiors as ladies are from theirs.  That’s the question.  What is the meaning of your ’not being able to leave her for a day, for fear she should fall under other influences’?  Then, I copy your words, you say, ‘She is all things to everybody, and cannot help it.’  In that case, I would seize my opportunity and her waist, and tell her she was locked up from anybody else.  Friendship with men—­but I cannot understand friendship with women, and watching them to keep them right, which must mean that you do not think much of them.”

Mrs. Lovell, at this point, raised her eyes abruptly from the letter and returned it.

“You discuss me very freely with your friend,” she said.

Percy drooped to her.  “I warned you when you wished to read it.”

“But, you see, you have bewildered him.  It was scarcely wise to write other than plain facts.  Men of that class.”  She stopped.

“Of that class?” said he.

“Men of any class, then:  you yourself:  if any one wrote to you such things, what would you think?  It is very unfair.  I have the honour of seeing you daily, because you cannot trust me out of your sight?  What is there inexplicable about me?  Do you wonder that I talk openly of women who are betrayed, and do my best to help them?”.

“On the contrary; you command my esteem,” said Percy.

“But you think me a puppet?”

“Fond of them, perhaps?” his tone of voice queried in a manner that made her smile.