“I don’t remember, no, and I can’t spare you to go, anyway. There’s all the pickles to put up, and apples to dry, and apple butter to stir, and the pig to be killed, with lard to try out, and sausage to make, and potatoes to be sorted over, and Brother Solon’s wife coming for a visit. You don’t much more than earn your salt now, and to go to school you wouldn’t be worth anything. All you care about it anyway is just for an excuse to race and run and get rid of work.”
“It isn’t, either,” Posey protested hotly, “I like to study. Ask my teachers at the Refuge if I didn’t have my lessons. Besides I want to go to school so I can be a teacher myself some day.”
“A teacher,” with a scornful laugh that sent the blood to Posey’s face, “a pretty teacher you’d make.”
“And when I came here with you,” Posey went on, sticking to the point in issue, “you promised that I should go to school.”
“I can teach you all you need. And for a poor girl who has to depend on charity for her bringing up, to know how to work is a great deal more account than a little smattering of books, and a lot of high-flown, silly ideas that will never amount to anything.”
“Then you don’t mean that I shall go to school at all?” Posey’s voice trembled a little as she put the question. She had grown pale around the mouth, and her eyes had become wide and dark.
“I don’t know as it’s any of your business what I intend,” was the answer in Mrs. Hagood’s most decided tone. “I’ve told you that you couldn’t go now, and I don’t want to hear another word about it.”
Posey laid down the ball of carpet rags she had been winding and faced Mrs. Hagood, her slim figure very erect and a spot of red burning on each cheek. “You are a wicked woman, and a liar,” she cried shrilly, all the gathered disappointment and bitterness of months breaking out in a sudden burst of fiery passion. “You promised Mr. Mott, at the Refuge, that I should go to school; I heard you, and I shall write and tell him just what you have done.”
“You will, will you?” scoffed Mrs. Hagood. “And who do you suppose will believe what you say, a deceiving medium’s child?”
“I wasn’t her child, as you know well enough,” retorted Posey. “And whatever she was, she was better than you. She sent me to school, and didn’t make me work every enduring minute of the time. And my own mother was the most beautiful lady that ever lived; you are no more like her than you are like an angel. You are a bad, cruel woman, that’s what you are.”