Chapter 11 - Page 2

Magdalens go
into the Catholic church."

"In spite of which you don't think she'll be saved?"

"SHE thinks she will--that's all I can tell you. There's no doubt
that when once she brought herself to accept her real remedy, as
she calls it, she began to enjoy a relief that she had never known.
That feeling, very new and in spite of what she pays for it most
refreshing, has given her something to hold on by, begotten in her
foolish little mind a belief that, as she says, she's on the mend
and that in the course of time, if she leads a tremendously healthy
life, she'll be able to take off her muzzle and become as dangerous
again as ever. It keeps her going."

"And what keeps you? You're good until the parties begin again."

"Oh she doesn't object to me now!" smiled Mrs. Meldrum. "I'm going
to take her abroad; we shall be a pretty pair." I was struck with
this energy and after a moment I enquired the reason of it. "It's
to divert her mind," my friend replied, reddening again a little, I
thought. "We shall go next week: I've only waited to see how your
mother would be before starting." I expressed to her hereupon my
sense of her extraordinary merit and also that of the
inconceivability of Flora's fancying herself still in a situation
not to jump at the chance of marrying a man like Dawling. "She
says he's too ugly; she says he's too dreary; she says in fact he's
'nobody,'" Mrs. Meldrum pursued. "She says above all that he's not
'her own sort.' She doesn't deny that he's good, but she finds him
impossibly ridiculous. He's quite the last person she would ever
dream of." I was almost disposed on hearing this to protest that
if the girl had so little proper feeling her noble suitor had
perhaps served her right; but after a while my curiosity as to just
how her noble suitor HAD served her got the better of that emotion,
and I asked a question or two which led my companion again to apply
to him the invidious term I have already quoted. What had happened
was simply that Flora had at the eleventh hour broken down in the
attempt to put him off with an uncandid account of her infirmity
and that his lordship's interest in her had not been proof against
the discovery of the way she had practised on him. Her
dissimulation, he was obliged to perceive, had been infernally
deep. The future in short assumed a new complexion for him when
looked at through the grim glasses of a bride who, as he had said
to some one, couldn't really, when you came to find out, see her
hand before her face. He had conducted himself like any other
jockeyed customer--he had returned the animal as unsound. He had
backed out in his own way, giving the business, by some sharp
shuffle, such a turn as to make the rupture ostensibly