Page:Early Autumn (1926).pdf/88

 I did not suffer. I assure you that I would rather have shared him with fifty other women than have had any one of the men about here all to myself."

There was a frank immorality in this statement which put Aunt Cassie to rout, bag and baggage. She merely stared, finding nothing to say in reply to such a speech. Clearly, in all her life she had never heard any one say a thing so bald and so frank, so completely naked of all pretense of gentility.

Sabine went on coldly, pushing her assault to the very end. "I divorced him at last, not because he was unfaithful to me, but because there was another woman who wanted to marry him . . . a woman whom I respect and like . . . a woman who is still my friend. Understand that I loved him passionately . . . in a very fleshly way. One couldn't help it. I wasn't the only woman. . . . He was a kind of devil, but a very fascinating one."

The old woman was a little stunned but not by any means defeated. Sabine saw a look come into her eyes, a look which clearly said, "So this is what the world has done to my poor, dear, innocent little Sabine!" At last she said with a sigh, "I find it an amazing world. I don't know what it is coming to."

"Nor I," replied Sabine with an air of complete agreement and sympathy. She understood that the struggle was not yet finished, for Aunt Cassie had a way of putting herself always in an impregnable position, of wrapping herself in layer after layer of sighs and sympathy, of charity and forgiveness, of meekness and tears, so that in the end there was no way of suddenly tearing them aside and saying, "There you are . . . naked at last, a horrible meddling old woman!" And Sabine kept thinking, too, that if Aunt Cassie had lived in the days of her witch-baiting ancestor, Preserved Pentland, she would have been burned for a witch.