"
"Are there no ladies at those parties, then?"
"Oh, yes!" replied Letty, smiling again at Mary's ignorance of
the world, "the grandest of ladies--duchesses and all. You don't
know what a favorite Tom is in the highest circles!"
Now Mary could believe almost anything bearing on Tom's being a
favorite, for she herself liked him a great deal more than she
approved of him; but she could not see the sense of his going to
parties without his wife, neither could she see that the
_height_ of the circle in which he was a favorite made any
difference. She had old-fashioned notions of a man and his wife
being one flesh, and felt a breach of the law where they were
separated, whatever the custom--reason there could be none. But
Letty seemed much too satisfied to give her any light on the
matter. Did it seem to her so natural that she could not
understand Mary's difficulty? She could not help suspecting,
however, that there might be something in this recurrence of a
separation absolute as death--for was it not a passing of one
into a region where the other could not follow?--to account for
the change in her.--The same moment, as if Letty divined what was
passing in Mary's thought, and were not altogether content with
the thing herself, but would gladly justify what she could not
explain, she added, in the tone of an unanswerable argument:
"Besides, Mary, how could I get a dress fit to wear at such
parties? You wouldn't have me go and look like a beggar! That
would be to disgrace Tom.
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