"Don't you think, Mrs. Webbe," I asked, trying to look as sunny as a June day, "that baby is rather young to get harm from me or my heresies? Couldn't the whole matter at least be left till she is old enough to know the meaning of words?"
She looked at me with more determination than ever.
"Well, of course it's handsome of you to be willing to take care of Tom's baby, and of course you won't mind the expense; but you made him marry that girl, so it's only fair you should expect to take some of the trouble that's come of what you did."
"You don't mean," I burst out before I thought, "that you wouldn't have had Tom marry her?"
"It's no matter now, as long as she didn't live," Mrs. Webbe answered; "though it isn't pleasant knowing that one of that Brownrig tribe married into our family."
I had nothing to say. It would have hurt my pride, of course, had one of my kin made such a marriage, and I cannot help some secret feeling that Julia had forfeited her right to be treated like an honest girl; but there was baby to be considered. Besides this, the marriage was made, it seems to me, by Tom's taking the girl, not by the service at her deathbed. Mrs. Webbe and I sat for a time without words. I looked at the carpet, and was conscious that Mrs. Webbe looked at me. She is not a pleasant woman, and I have had times of wishing she might be carried off by a whirlwind, so that Deacon Webbe and Tom might have a little peace; but I believe in her way she tries to be a good one. The trouble is that her way of being good seems to me to be a great deal more vicious than most kinds of wickedness. She uses her religion like a tomahawk, and whacks with it right and left.
"Look here," she broke out at last, "I don't want to be unpleasant, but it ain't a pleasant thing for me to come here anyway. I suppose you mean to be kind, but you'd be soft with baby. That's just what she mustn't have. She'd better be made to know from the very start what's before her."
"What is before her?" I asked.
Mrs. Webbe flushed.
"I don't know as there's any use of my telling you if you don't see it yourself. She's got to fight her way through life against her inheritance from that mother of hers, and—and her father."