Dear son roughly repulsed her, saying: "There's no need to go outside of our family for help. If Rita wasn't the most selfish, ungrateful fool alive, she'd settle all our troubles by one word."
"Would you have me sell myself, Tom?" asked the ungrateful sister.
"Of course I would!! sell yourself!! rot!! You'd be getting a mighty good price. There's lots better-looking girls 'en you would jump at the chance. Sell yourself? Ain't Williams a fine gentleman? Where's another like him? Ain't he rich? Ain't he everything a girl could want in a man—everything but a green country clodhopper?"
"All that may be true, Tom, but I can't marry him. I can't," returned Rita, weeping and sobbing in her father's arms.
"Can't you, Rita?" asked Mr. Bays. "All that Tom says about him is true, every word. Williams is good enough for any girl in the world but you. No man is that. You would soon forget Dic."
"No, no, father, never, never, in all my life."
"And you would soon learn to like Williams," continued the distracted father. "Please, Rita, try to do this and save me and Tom."
"She shall do it," cried Madam Jeffreys, taking courage from the knowledge that at last her husband was her ally. She went to Rita and pulled her from her father's arms. "She shall do it or go into the street this very night, never to enter my house again. I'll never speak to her again if she don't. It will pain me to treat my own flesh and blood so harshly, but it is my duty—my duty. I have toiled and suffered and endured for her sake all my life, and it will almost kill me to turn against her now; but if she don't save her father and brother, I surely will. God tells me it is my duty. I do not care for myself. I have eaten husks all my life, ever since I got married, and I can die eating them; but for the sake of my dear husband and my dear son who bears his own father's name, it is my duty, God tells me it is my duty to spurn her. It is but duty and justice; and justice to all is my motto. It was my father's motto." She was a wordy orator, but her vocabulary was limited; and after several repetitions of the foregoing sentiments, she turned from oratory to anatomy. "Oh, my heart," she cried, placing her hand upon her breast, "I believe I am about to die."
She sank gasping into the chair, from which she had risen to hurl her Philippic at Rita's head, and by sheer force of her indomitable will caused a most alarming pallor to overspread her face. Rita ran for the camphor, Mr. Bays fetched the whiskey, and under these restoratives Madam Jeffreys so far recovered that her husband and son were able to remove her from the chair to the bed. Rita, in tribulation and tears, sat upon the bedside, chafing her mother's hands and doing all in her power to relieve the sufferer.
"Don't touch me, ungrateful child," cried Mrs. Margarita, "don't touch me! If you won't save your father and brother from ruin when you can, you are not fit to touch your mother. I am dying now," she continued, gasping for breath. "Because of your cruelty and ingratitude, the blow has been more than God, in His infinite mercy, has given me strength to endure. When I am gone, you will remember about this. I forgive you; I forgive you." Sigh followed sigh, and Rita feared she had killed her parent.