e know now with the
amount of dissimulation, if not treachery, she must have practised on
an unsuspicious boy, assuming that she did, as a matter of course,
conceal her relation with Penderfield. One timid conjecture we have
is, that the girl, having to deal with a subject every accepted phrase
relating to which is an equivocation or an hypocrisy, really found it
impossible to make her position understood by a lover who simply
idolized the ground she trod on. Under such circumstances, she may
either have given up the attempt in despair, or jumped too quickly to
the conclusion that she had succeeded in communicating the facts, and
had been met half-way by forgiveness. Put yourself in her position,
and resolve in your mind exactly how you would have gone about it--how
you would have got a story of that sort forced into the mind of a
welcoming lover; wedged into the heart of his unsuspicious rapture.
Or, if you fancied he understood you, and no storm of despairing
indignation came, think how easy it would be to persuade yourself you
had done your duty by the facts, and might let the matter lapse! Why
should not one woman once take advantage of the obscurities of decorum
so many a man has found comforting to his soul during confession of
sin, when pouring his revelations into an ear whose owner's experience
of life has not qualified her to understand them. Think of the
difficulty you yourself have encountered in getting at the absolute
facts in some delicate concurrence of circumstances in this connexion,
because of the fundamental impossibility of getting any one, man or
woman, to speak direct truth!

Let us find out, or construct, all the excuses we can for poor Miss
Graythorpe. Let us imagine the last counsel she had from the only one
of her own sex who would be likely to know anything of the matter--the
nefarious partner (if the Major's surmise was true) in the crime of
her betrayer. "You are making a fuss about nothing. Men are not so
immaculate themselves; your Gerry is no Joseph! If he rides the high
horse with you, just you ask him what _he_ had to say to Potiphar's
wife! Oh, we're not so strait-laced out here--bless us alive!--as we
are in England, or pretend to be." We can fancy the elegant brute
saying it.

All our surmises bring us very little light, though. It is not that
we are at such a loss to forgive poor Sally Graythorpe as a mere human
creature we know nothing about. The difficulty is to reconcile what