Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/101

Rh her the chance to prolong her pause for a full minute. When the door had closed on him, she said: “Judged by reason, your arguments are unanswerable; but when it comes to a question of feeling”

“Feeling? What kind of feeling? You don’t mean to suggest anything so preposterous as that Bessy?”

She made a gesture. of smiling protest. “I confess it is to be regretted that his mother is a lady, and that he looks—you must have noticed it?——so amazingly like the portraits of the young Schiller. But I only meant that Bessy forms all her opinions emotionally; and that she must have been very strongly affected by the scene Mr. Tredegar described to us.”

“Ah,” Mr. Langhope interjected, replying ﬁrst to her parenthesis, “how a woman of your good sense stumbled on that idea of hunting up the mother—!” but Mrs. Ansell answered, with a slight grimace: “My dear Henry, if you could see the house they live in you’d think I had been providentially guided there!” and, reverting to the main issue, he went on fretfully: “But why, after hearing the true version of the facts, should Bessy still be inﬂuenced by that sensational scene? Even if it was not, as Tredegar suspects, cooked up expressly to take her in, she must see that the hospital doctor is, after all, as likely as any one to know how the accident really happened, and how seriously the fellow is hurt.” [ 87 ]