"Ah," she cried, "for wholesale, downright vanity commend me to a man! It's no use looking savage, Philip; I cannot help it, I must have my laugh out; your cool assumption of the be-all and end-all of Patricia's existence is too irresistibly funny. It's very man-like, and very characteristic. You never take into consideration, you lords of creation, the up-bringing, education and surroundings of a girl of the world. You forget that the very trifles you stigmatise as frivolities are the daily small necessities of her life: she knows nothing different. It is as natural to her to have pretty clothes, artistic surroundings, and dainty employments, as it is for you to go to a crack tailor and smoke an irreproachable cigar. She cannot understand another sort of world where these elements are not: she accepts them as a matter of course, and could not fashion her day without them. Then comes some untoward fate, in the shape of a lover from that unfamiliar world, whose habits, manner of life, occupations, are all opposed to hers—as opposite as the luxurious civilisation of Europe is to that of the heart of Africa. What she deems necessities, he calls luxuries; her natural pastimes become frivolities; her occupations, idleness; her unconscious acceptation of all that money brings, worldliness; and her hesitation, when her lover and her love demand the sacrifice of all this, pusillanimity and calculativeness. And what does the man offer in exchange?—for luxurious comfort, straitened means; for dainty clothes, the resuscitated dresses of last year; for society—a tired harassed husband; and for recreation—perhaps a cheap place at some theatre, two or three times a year."
"You are painfully frank, Esther," said Mr. Tremain, stiffly.
"Yes, and I mean to be," continued Mrs. Newbold, "because it is a subject I have very much at heart, and because it is the fashion of the day to cry down the worldly maiden, and cry up the poor, but self-sacrificing lover. Had you anything better to offer Patricia, than what my words picture? Was there any brighter prospect for her? Did you not make the sacrifice as great a one as possible, and could you honourably and reasonably have expected the change in your fortunes, when you urged Patricia's choice, and left her no alternative between poverty with you, and her accustomed luxury without you? Do you not understand her position somewhat better, Philip, since you have become a man of luxury and wealth?"
"You should qualify as a special pleader, Esther," was Mr. Tremain's reply; "but you are in a manner right, a woman's motives are always beyond a man's fathoming;" and then with half a sigh she heard him add, under his breath, "poor Patty, poor pretty wilful Patty!" and she smiled at the inconsequent words, and nodded her pretty head at the dancing flames, while the lurking look of triumph in her eyes shone out defiantly, and drove away the droop of apprehension from her lips.
Then came Long, and the tea-tray, and little Marianne, and Mrs. Esther was very gracious and sweet, and full of petits soins for Mr. Tremain's comfort, and withal so winsome and so subduedly elated, that Dick Darling—who returned presently with all her volunteers in outrageous spirits—declared she was "the daisyest thing out, and quite too superlatively lovely!"
"And how did you find the old salts, Dick?" asked Esther, when every one had been served with tea, and little Marianne was particularly happy, forcing some scalding milk down the luckless throat of "Trim," her fidus Achates in terrier-dog form.
"Oh, as fresh as paint, and as delightfully greedy and selfish as it behoves all old men to be. They minutely inspected the 'baccy,' and one of them told me, ''tweren't his sort, but shiver his timbers if he could expect a young leddy ter know the difference atween "old virginny," and "honey dew";' and another one spat rather unpleasantly upon the new silver dollar I gave him, and expressed his rather blasphemous opinion, as to its being a 'Blaine dollar,' and only worth ninety cents! Oh, my dear, they are a most edifying old crew, and their simplicity and naturalness is only worthy of that respectable old party, and his residence, known familiarly as 'Davy Jones's locker.'"
"Dick, you are incorrigible!" laughed Mrs. Newbold, and that young lady, on whom the afternoon's expedition seemed to have acted as champagne, began again.
"There was one most particularly refreshing old hero; he said he had been all through the civil war, and got his promotion, and his leg bowled off, at Gettysburgh——"
"Oh, but I say, Miss Dick," here broke in Freddy Slade, "he couldn't do it, you know, not there, because Gettysburgh was a land battle, and how could your old man-o'-war's man be there?"