"I don't believe I can imagine so much as that exactly, but I can
imagine her being afraid of Miss Gage's taking it out of her
somehow. Now she will take it out of us. I hope you realise that
you've done it now, my dear. To be sure, you will have all your
life to repent of your rashness."

"I shall never repent," Mrs. March retorted hardily. "It was the
right thing, the only thing. We couldn't have let that poor
creature stay on, when she was so anxious to get back to her
husband."

"No."

"And I confess, Basil, that I feel a little pity for that poor girl,
too. It would have been cruel, it would have been fairly wicked, to
let her go home so soon, and especially now."

"Oh! And I suppose that by ESPECIALLY NOW, you mean Kendricks," I
said, and I laughed mockingly, as the novelists say. "How sick I am
of this stale old love-business between young people! We ought to
know better--we're old enough; at least YOU are."

She seemed not to feel the gibe. "Why, Basil," she asked dreamily,
"haven't you any romance left in you?"

"Romance? Bah! It's the most ridiculous unreality in the world.
If you had so much sympathy for that stupid girl, in that poor woman
in her anxiety about her disappointment, why hadn't you a little for
her sick husband? But a husband is nothing--when you have got him."