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Updated: May 22, 2025
When I praised Ideala's loyalty, and her uncomplaining devotion to an uncongenial duty, Claudia said: "Loyalty is all very well; but I don't see much merit in a life- long devotion to a bad cause.
One letter I have here shows something of the strength and tenderness of Ideala's devotion; and I venture to think that, even under the circumstances, it must be good for a man to have been loved once in his life like that. The letter begins abruptly "Oh, the delight of being able to write to you," she says, "without fear and without constraint.
For it seems these three, when they had finished the baked potatoes, drew their chairs to the fire and talked. And one can well imagine what Ideala's stories were her tales of the Japanese with whom she had lived; of Chinese prisons into which she had peeped; of earthquakes, tornadoes and shipwrecks, and other perils by land and sea, all told in a voice that thrilled you, whatever it said.
I asked, and felt for a moment I had said a silly thing; but she turned to me quickly, and looked at me for the first time as if she saw me and when I say she looked at me, I mean something more than an ordinary look, for Ideala's eyes were a wonder, affecting you as a poem does which has power to exalt. "Ah, you feel it too," she said. "Are they not beautiful? Will you sit beside me here?
"Oh, won it, most decidedly!" we all agreed. "By-the-by, what was the bet?" I asked. "My Pa's gaiters against Ideala's blue stockings. I regret to say that circumstances over which I have no control" and he glanced at the unconscious Bishop "prevent the immediate payment of my debt unless, indeed, he has a second pair;" and he left the room hurriedly as if to see.
If there were any good to be done by it, it would be different, of course; but, as it is, Ideala is simply sacrificing herself for nothing and worse, she is setting a bad example by showing men they need not mend their manners since wives will endure anything. It is immoral for a woman to live with such a husband. I don't understand Ideala's meekness; it amounts to weakness sometimes, I think.
At this time Ideala's own life was not unlike one of these hapless straws, and it seemed a wretched failure of its early promise, that ending as a straw on the common stream, when so little might have made her influence in her own sphere like the river itself, strong and beautiful.
"Hush!" she protested, as if I had blasphemed. "You must not speak of him like that. He is a gentleman as true and loyal as you are yourself. And he is everything to me." But these assurances were only what I had expected from Ideala, and in no way altered my opinion of Mr. Lorrimer. I knew Ideala's peculiar conscience well.
Carne stood while she was speaking with a cup of tea in her hand, and tried to catch Ideala's eye in order to signal with raised eyebrows her contempt for Beth's opinion; but Ideala was listening with approval. "That is exactly what I think," she exclaimed, "only I could not have expressed it so. You write yourself doubtless?" But Beth had become confused, and only gazed at her by way of reply.
"This is delightful, is it not?" Claudia whispered to me in the drawing-room on the evening of her return. "Delightful," I answered; but I was puzzled. Ideala's variableness was all on the surface, and I felt sure that this sudden change, which looked like ease after agony, meant something serious. She did not keep me long in suspense.
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