"What for? I mean, why do you go on raking up? Can't you leave alone?"
"That's just what I was going to say, dear! Especially in this case. Because there's really no need, if you come to think of it. I'll tell you, dear, exactly what I should _recommend_ you to do--what _I_ should do if I were in your place. I should either say _absolutely nothing_, or if I said anything at all, just make it chaff--talk about his new flame--say you will evidently have to get somebody else, don't you see? As if it was entirely out of the question! Or perhaps that would be dangerous, and it wouldn't do to have him thinking you suspected him of fancying you weren't in earnest. No!--on the whole, I recommend saying _absolutely nothing_."
Marianne's brain refuses to receive complications beyond a certain point. She picks up the last intelligible phrase. "As if _what_ was entirely out of the question?"
But Mrs. Eldridge is on her guard against making mischief. "You mustn't run away with the idea that I said there _was_ anything," is the form her caution takes. And then, in response to an angry flush on her friend's face, "I'm sure there isn't the slightest reason for you to be uneasy. I have far too much faith in your husband to suppose such a thing possible for one moment.... No, indeed, dear!--even if she gets him to get her into this play of his--and then, of course, they would go on seeing each other--I shouldn't feel the smallest uneasiness. Because look at her social position!"
"What _has_ her social position got to do with it?"
Mrs. Eldridge elevates her eyebrows, and perhaps her shoulders, slightly, as though asking space what next? But she brings both down to the level of her friend's knowledge of the world before answering: "I should have said _everything_. A woman in her position doesn't commit herself in any way with a man in your husband's, however distinguished he may be. Read any divorce case of that sort of people, and see if they don't have co-respondents of condition. Of course, I'm not speaking of disgraceful cases, where the woman isn't received after. But ordinary divorce cases in Fashionable Life."
"I can't see what you're talking about, Charlotte."
"Then I can't help it, dear. But I should have thought it was pretty plain, for all that!"