Should She Have Left Him? — page 98: what you’re looking at

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92 SHOULD SHE HAVE LEFT HIM ? Diplomacy is assumption and presumption. We assume that there is no other view of the subject we are about to discuss than the one we maintain, and presume that this is conceded by the other side. Mrs. Courtenay was a social and domestic diplomat. She made her first move in accordance with the laws of the game. She met with an immediate check. Dorothy conceded nothing. Indeed she was positive there were other views than those entertained by her mother, which, though not held by everybody, were, nevertheless, based on truth and good morals. The issue was joined in the begin- ning. Mrs. Courtenay, with all the force she could summon and the ingenuity she could command, made a presentment of the conventionalities. Dorothy met it with the arguments she employed with Mr. Magrane, Trescotte, and her father, per- haps with a little more skill, because they were now a little more familiar to her lips and vocabulary. In vain did Mrs. Courtenay plead that morality was opposed to Dorothy’s course. For each statement the daughter had an answer, and for each argument acounter one. It is not for me to say on which side lay the logic, but if sophistry was Dorothy’s weapon it was effective against logic in her mother’s hands. Mrs. Courtenay beaten, if not convinced, retired from the discussion of the moral aspect and addressed herself to the social, where she thought, as she had a right, she was invincible, since she was a leader in forming social laws and customs. When she presented to Dorothy the fact that she could Comicbookks C@© 3