130
FLAMING
standards in college.
YOUTH
But our finishing schools, churchly
or otherwise! Hell is paved with their good intentions. Pat's is not worse than the others, I suppose. But the pity of it; the waste of it for her. Hers is such a vivid mind; such a brave, straightforward little mind; at war with that hungry, passionate temperament of hers, yet instinctively clean if it could be protected from befoulment. I have been talking biology with her and she absorbs it with such swiit, sure appreciation. The day of trial for her will come when the lighter amusements pall and her brain demands something to feed en—unless before that time it becomes totally encysted. “Cary Scott’s inguence on her is good. She likes and
respects him and is a little afraid of him, too.
He has
a quality of quiet contempt for cheap and shoddy things to which she responds, though not always without bursts of her fiery little temper. If he were less of the natural aristocrat in all the outer attributes he would not impress her so. Meantime I am glad to see him take some interest even though it be but a playfully intellectual one, in anyone who will divert his mind from Constance. Sometimes I have thought disaster imminent in that quarter. Disaster! How readily one falls into the moralist’s speech, and how your dear lips would quirk at that tone from me, dearest.
Yet a liaison between those two would
be potentially disastrous. For Connie has nothing to give to a man like Cary Scott except her beauty. If he is the man I think him, he will never take her for that
alone; or, if he does, be long satisfied with it.
Yet her
charm is terribly strong. ... I wonder whether you really loved Cary Scott, Mona, as I have loved and still
love you... .” Coming downstairs after writing this letter, from the dead woman’s
room where a desk had been set aside for
iea nnfebd
