Lucia had no desire to be strong; she continued to weep without reserve.
"She was lovely—lovely; I can see it through all he says of her, and how bitterly she blamed herself to be the cause of her husband's and son's abandonment by their fine relations. She would have been willing to give them up, to go off anywhere, in any poverty, so they might have the position, and luxuries, and advantages of the station to which they were born. But they clung to each other and to her, as anybody might know they would!"
And once more the hot tears came.
There was a moment's silence in which Mrs. Laniston canvassed this unprecedented difficulty.
"And now he reproaches himself that afterward he did not go to his grandfather. He is wild about it. He says his grandfather was right from his standpoint, and he was old and forlorn, and yearned for the arm of his son's son to lean upon. He is stricken with remorse, and he has no peace. No—he didn't talk at all about the legacy."
Mrs. Laniston gathered her forces for a desperate coup.
"Lucia Laniston, listen to me. You are not falling in love with that man, for of course you couldn't consider so ignorant a person, with so frightful an accent and choice of phrases. But you are allowing your imagination to become involved."
"Oh, no, Aunt Dora," Lucia murmured. But Mrs. Laniston kept on.
"It is not becoming for you to sit here on the floor in that nice dress—and there is no earthly process by which those delicate fabrics can be cleaned—and weep your eyes out about a stranger's mother. No matter how lovely—and she took an international prize for beauty—she was a circus girl, or a ballet dancer, a position that in itself it is impossible to ignore or forget, no matter what he or anyone else may say. I am glad, since his father was one of Judge Lloyd's sons, that he is to be redeemed from that awful calling; it seems that he will own that small Jennico plantation near us in Louisiana, and the little six-room frame house on it. I suppose he will farm there, and maybe some people will receive him on sufferance—such an uneducated man, my dear! Of course I know if he were really rich he could go where he pleases, and the best society would pull caps for him, and he could marry whom he chooses. Don't think I am sordid, dear. I don't make these conventions. They are the inexorable law of the world. But consider, my dear, what—once in New Orleans, or St. Simon's Island, or Jacksonville—you would think of such a cavalier. You know I have never been hateful and stiff with you and Ruth. I have let you have all the good time you could with propriety. I think this young fellow's prize-beauty makes him very fetching, and his 'lydy,' isn't the awful address it would be on any other tongue; and his suddenly inheriting a bit of money is like a romance. But life is made up of commonplaces and realities, dear, and a girl who lets herself dream in the moonlight must wake at least to a very sordid day. Your papa wouldn't forgive me if I didn't warn you, dear. Love must be founded on respect; a man must be in a position for a woman to look up to him, to defer to his experience and judgment, and superior information and education. A woman cannot lead a husband by the hand."
"You take too much for granted, Aunt Dora," Lucia interrupted, a trifle angrily.