ready to blame her whatever
she did.

But the answer was eloquent with reproach.

"Certainly I didn't see them. I have never seen any of them. When that
horrible newspaper started trying to get him pardoned, reporters came
here in shoals. I never saw them. I'd have died sooner."

"Did Jeff write you he didn't want to be pardoned? He did us."

"No. He hasn't written me for years."

She looked a baffling number of things now, voluntarily pathetic, a
little scornful, as if she washed her hands gladly of the whole affair.

"Farvie thinks," said Lydia recklessly, "that you haven't written to
him."

"How could I?" asked Esther, in a quick rebuttal which actually had a
convincing sound, "when he didn't write to me?"

"But he was in prison."

"He hasn't had everything to bear," said Esther, rising and putting some
figurines right on the mantel where they seemed to be right enough
before. "Do you know any woman whose life has been ruined as mine has?
Have you ever met one? Now have you?"

"Farvie's life is ruined," said Lydia incisively. "Jeff's life is
ruined, too. I don't know whether it's any worse for a woman than for a
man."

"Jeffrey," said Esther, "is taking the consequences of his own act."

"You don't mean to tell me you think he was to blame?" Lydia said, in a
low tone charged with her own complexity of sentiment. She was
horror-stricken chiefly. Esther saw that, and looked at her in a large
amaze.

"You don't mean to tell me you think he wasn't?" she countered.

"Why, of course he wasn't!" Lydia's cheeks were flaming. She was
impatiently conscious of this heat and her excited breath. But she had
entered the fray, and there was no returning.

"Then who was guilty?" Esther asked it almost triumphantly, as if the
point of proving herself right were more to her than the innocence of
Jeff.

"That's for us to find out," said Lydia. She looked like the apostle of
a holy war.

"But if you could find out, why haven't you done it before? Why have you
waited all these years?"

"Partly because we weren't grown up, Anne and I. And even when we were,
when we'd begun to think about it, we were giving dancing lessons, to
help out. You know Farvie put almost every cent he had into paying the
creditors, and then it was only a drop in the bucket. And besides Jeff
pleaded guilty, and he kept writing Farvie to let it all stand as it
was, and somehow, we were so sorry for Jeff we couldn't help feeling
he'd got to