life? Oh, what a fool, what a fool I have been—to let people get me into their power this way!"
And she began to weep again with rage and nervous misery, crumpling up the St. Augustine under her feverish, flabby body.
Teresa felt a shudder of pitying repulsion. How was it possible that anyone could so utterly go to pieces morally, could so sink to be, as Edith herself had said, the slave of other people? Weakness made one a slave, true—but not necessarily as Nina meant when she pointed her moral with Edith. Edith had been a fool—but she might have done whatever she had done, and not have been a fool. To love was not folly—it was only folly to be trivial.
••••••
Two days later Teresa drove down with the Pepolis, and without Edith, reluctant to leave Ronald for a whole day, though he was now quite recovered, but unable to resist her curiosity to see Crayven's wife. It was hot in the plain, coming down out of the freshness of the mountain heights; and the little town of Montreux glittered meretriciously in imitation smartness, crowded in between the hills and the swimming turquoise-blue of the lake. The luncheon-party had the same air of smartness, the misfortune of which was that it, too, had a factitious air. Adela Crayven and her friends were all of the
