"It's all a failure if you do!
Promise me that you will _think this over_. Let me send you the note
Nellie wrote me before she went away. Won't you try to imagine what she is
suffering to-day, in the change from what she went to you hoping, and what
she received at your hands?"
"Let me see," said James Minturn. "At this hour she is probably enduring
the pangs of wearing the most tasteful afternoon gown on the veranda of
whatever summer resort suits her variable fancy, also the discomfiture of
the woman she induced to bid high and is now winning from at bridge. I am
particularly intimate with her forms of suffering; you see I judge them by
my own and my children's during the past years."
"Then you think I'm not sincere?" asked Leslie.
"Surely, my dear girl!" said Mr. Minturn. "With all my heart I believe
you! I know you are loyal to her, and to me! It isn't _you_ I disbelieve,
child, it is my wife."
"But I've told you over and over that she's changed."
"And I refuse to believe in her power to undergo the genuine and permanent
change that would make her an influence for good with her sons, or
anything but an uncontrollable element in my home," said Mr.
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