"Better!" I insisted firmly. "You little know what it means—that rushing into irrevocable matrimony without counting the cost—without knowing what it entails—without experience or means——"
"Mother," he interrupted, still smiling—a little impudently, though I don't think he meant to be rude—"you were not any more experienced than we are, and not any older or richer, were you?"
I replied with dignity that my case was nowise in point. He wanted to know why it was not. I said, because I—unlike him—had been practically homeless at the time. And he cried, "Were you? I never heard of that!" and stared at me in such a way that I blushed hotly, though old enough to know better. He was an obstinate fellow, and he corresponded with his grandfather and young uncles and aunts in England, and had a heap of their autographed photos in his room. I thought I had better turn him over to his father.
Tom was walking in the garden with Emily, who had managed to get around him in that innocent-seeming way of hers—well, I must not be uncharitable; I daresay it was innocent, and I could almost have fancied that they did not care about being interrupted. Only, of course, that's nonsense.
"My dear," I said, in a sprightly voice, "your young man seems to find his mother a bore these days, and it's only natural. I have been trying to cheer him, and he responds by yawning in my face. Pray do go and exercise your spells, which are so much more potent, and leave me my old man, who is still my own."
Was there any harm in a little light chaff of this kind? One would surely think not. But Tom, standing and looking after her as she slipped away, blushing in her ready, ingénue fashion—so unlike a B.A.—said, quite gravely——
"That's a dear little soul, Polly! And I wouldn't speak to her in just that sort of a way, if I were you. It hurts her."
"It hurts me," I returned, "when you speak in that sort of a way. It is most unjust. Can't you take a joke? You know perfectly well that I treat her with the utmost kindness and consideration—that I have accepted her unreservedly, for my boy's sake."
"Well, well," said he, "I know you don't mean it. Your bark's worse than your bite, old girl. Come and look at the new pigs."
He drew my hand under his arm and patted it. We had had so many little tiffs lately—things we never dreamt of till Miss Blount came!—that I was determined not to quarrel now. It should never be said that I was to blame for making a happy home unhappy. I swallowed my vexation and went to see the pigs—thirteen little black Berkshires, all as lively as they could be, on which he gloated whole-heartedly for the moment, as if they were more than wife or children. In his expansive ardour he offered me one of them to make a festive dish of for Sunday.