This, she could never promise to do; and the result might be a
quarrel. Whereas if she avoided giving her word, she would be free to
slip out now and then to see poor Agnes, when Richard was on his rounds
and Mr. Henry at business. But this was the only point clear to her. In
standing up for her friend she had been perfectly sincere: to think ill
of a person she cared for, cost Mary an inward struggle. Against this,
however, she had an antipathy to set that was almost stronger than
herself. Of all forms of vice, intemperance was the one she hated most.
She lived in a country where it was, alas! only too common; but she had
never learnt to tolerate it, or to look with a lenient eye on those who
succumbed: and whether these were but slaves of the nipping habit; or
the eternal dram-drinkers who felt fit for nothing if they had not a peg
inside them; or those seasoned topers who drank their companions under
the table without themselves turning a hair; or yet again those who,
sober for three parts of the year, spent the fourth in secret debauches.
Herself she had remained as rigidly abstemious as in the days of her
girlhood. And she often mused, with a glow at her heart, on her great
good fortune in having found in Richard one whose views on this subject
were no less strict than her own. Hence her distress at his disclosure
was caused not alone by the threatened loss of a friendship: she wept
for the horror with which the knowledge filled her.
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