He has a queer gift of making women care for him, and he trades
on it deliberately. He doesn't play fair; he doesn't mean to. Oh, I know
so many cruel things, despicable things, he's done. Don't look at me
like that, Stella. I'm not saying this just to wound you. I'm simply
putting you on your guard. You can't play with fire and not get burned.
If you've been nursing any feeling for Walter Monohan, crush it, cut it
out, just as you'd have a surgeon cut out a cancer. Entirely apart from
any question of Jack Fyfe, don't let this man play any part whatever in
your life. You'll be sorry if you do. There's not a man or woman whose
relations with Monohan have been intimate enough to enable them to
really know the man and his motives who doesn't either hate or fear or
despise him, and sometimes all three."
"That's a sweeping indictment," Stella said stiffly. "And you're very
earnest. Yet I can hardly take your word at its face value. If he's so
impossible a person, how does it come that you and your people
countenanced him socially? Besides, it's all rather unnecessary, Linda.
I'm not the least bit likely to do anything that will reflect on your
prospective husband, which is what it simmers down to, isn't it? I've
been pulled and hauled this way and that ever since I've been on the
coast, simply because I was dependent on some one else--first Charlie
and then Jack--for the bare necessities of life. When there's mutual
affection, companionship, all those intimate interests that marriage is
supposed to imply, I daresay a woman gives full measure for all she
receives.
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