No, indeed!--there was only
a savage resentment in her mind, the inexplicable sense that
somehow she had been tricked and cheated, and that he alone was
to blame.
Though she accused him of dishonesty in the Severance affair, the
charge was only secondary. Given another time, she might
carelessly have acquitted him, taking his own say-so as enough;
but Willoughby now had chosen a poor hour for his acknowledgment,
when he linked it to the tidings of his ruin. All that day she
kept to her bed, her mind absorbed with the catastrophe that had
swept out from under her the unsolid prop of her arrogant money
pride. For, again, without money what was left?
She showed herself the day following, wan and silent. Willoughby
was away; the news of his failure was public property, and she
writhed when she read of it in the daily prints. But in the
following days she suffered other pangs that were a healthy
counter-irritant--she learned to pick and number her FRIENDS, and
to know, among so large a list of acquaintances, how very few
they were. Though she was prepared for this, well aware what
befalls the one with broken playthings, nevertheless she was
filled with bitter exasperation against those who were no more
careless than she had been herself.
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