orgotten: "But I bet it's true. I'd simply hate a
jealous person, no matter how much they loved me! Wouldn't you, Eleanor?
Wouldn't you hate Maurice if he was jealous of you? I declare I don't
see how you can be so fond of Bingo!"

Maurice, suddenly ashamed of himself for his pleasure in seeing Eleanor
hit, was saying, inaudibly, "Good Lord! what will she say next?" To keep
her quiet, he said, good-naturedly, "Don't you want to sing, Nelly?"

She said, very low, "No." Her throat ached with the pain of knowing that
the one little contribution she could make to the occasion was not
really wanted!

Maurice did not urge her. He and the other two took off their shoes and
stockings; and went with squeals across the stubble, down a steep bank,
to a pebbly point of sand, round which a sunny swirl of water chattered
loudly, then went romping off into sparkling shallows. Edith's lifted
skirt, as she stepped into the current, assured her against the wetting
Eleanor had foreseen, and also showed her pretty legs--and Eleanor, on
the bank, her tensely trembling hand cuddling Bingo against her knee,
"guarded" her things! It was at this moment that her old, unrecognized
envy of Youth turned into a perfectly recognizable fear of Age. Edith
was a woman now, not a child! "And I--dislike her!" Eleanor said to
herself. She sat there alone, thinking of Edith's defects--her big
mouth, her bad manners, her loud voice; and as she thought,--watching
the waders all the while with tear-blurred eyes until a turn in the
current hid them--she felt this new dislike flowing in upon her: "He
talks to her; and forgets all about me!" ... She was deeply hurt. "He
says she has 'brains.' ... He doesn't mind it when she says she 'doesn't
care for music,' which is rude to me! And she talks about jealousy! She
knows I'm jealous. Any woman who loves her husband is jealous."

Of course this pathetically false opinion made it impossible for her to
realize that jealousy is just a form of self-love, nor could she enlarge
upon Edith's naive generalization and say that, if a woman suffers
because she is not the equal of the rival who gains her lover's
love--_that_ is not jealousy! It is the anguish of recognizing her own
defects, and it may be very noble. If she suffers because the rival is
her inferior, _that_ is not jealousy; it is the anguish of recognizing
defects in her lover, and it, too, is noble, for she is unhappy, not
because he has slighted her, but beca