"If you've decided to be some sort of a Mormon wife to that horrid Mr. Weston," she added, "I shouldn't be in the least surprised. Perhaps you'll take him in with the rest of his family."
I said I did indeed think of being married, but not to him.
"Let me know the worst at once, Ruth," she broke out, rather fiercely. "At my age I can't stand suspense as I could once. What tramp or beggar or clodhopper have you picked out? I know you too well to suppose it's anybody respectable."
When I named Tom, she at first pretended not to know him, although she has seen him a dozen times in her visits here, and once condescended to say that for a countryman he was really almost handsome.
"I know it's the same name as that baby's father's," she ended, her voice getting icier and icier, "but of course no respectable woman would think of marrying him."
"Then I'm not a respectable woman," I retorted, feeling the blood rise into my face, "for I'm thinking of it."
We looked for a moment into each other's eyes, and I felt, however I appeared, as if I were defying anything she could say.
"So he has taken advantage of your mothering his baby, has he?" she brought out at last.
I responded that he did not even suspect I meant to marry him. She stared, and demanded how he was to find out. I answered that I could think of no way except for me to tell him. She threw up her hands in pretended horror.
"I dare say," she burst out, "he only got you to take the baby so that you'd feel bound to him. I should think when he'd disgraced himself you might have self-respect enough to let him alone. Oh, what would Cousin Horace say!"