“Joe! Well, perhaps, when there’s nothing else left but the poorhouse. It’s pretty tough if I have to marry a mechanic.”
“Joe’s a good deal of a man. He won’t always be a mechanic, Lena. He’s got too much ambition.”
“He may, or he may not. Anyway, he’ll bear the marks of a mechanic all his days. I’m not his kind.”
Lena rose and went across the room to lean on the little dressing-table and survey herself in the old green glass. This was her panacea for every woe. The little pucker in her forehead straightened itself out.
“Look at me, mother,” she demanded, turning around. “Do you think all this is meant to scrub and sew and cook for the foreman in locomotive works? Because I don’t.”
She was smiling, but her mother did not smile in return.
“I believe I was most as pretty as you are when I was a girl,” Mrs. Quincy said. “And that was all the good it did. I thought I was making a grand marriage when I got your father; but he seemed to sort of flatten out and lose all his ambition after we was married. He didn’t seem to care about anything, though I used to give him my opinion pretty plain. And it’s mighty little he left me when he was took,” she added vindictively.
Her daughter eyed her speculatively.
“Well, I’m not going to be taken in the way you were,” she said sharply. “You thought a good old name and a promising career were enough; and father didn’t keep his promises. I want money and not the promise of money.”
“And where will you find him?” sniffed Mrs. Quincy, to whom “it” and “he” were synonymous. “I don’t notice any millionaires crowding up to you, for all your big eyes and your great opinion of yourself.”