“I know, I know,” sighed Mrs. Bromfield. “But what can I do? Emily is so headstrong and I am in such feeble health. I am forbidden the agitation of a discussion. I’ve told Emily that a girl without money, and with nothing but family, must be careful. But she won’t listen to me.”
Mrs. Ainslie, the most genuinely friendly of all the women who insured their own welcome by chaperoning a clever, pretty, popular girl, pressed the matter upon Emily with what seemed to her an impertinence to be resented.
“Don’t be offended, child,” said Mrs. Ainslie, replying to Emily’s haughty coldness. “You ought to thank me. I only hope you will never regret it. A girl without a dot can’t afford to trifle. A second season is dangerous, especially here in Washington, where they bring the babies out of the nursery to marry them off.”
“Why, you yourself used to call Bob Fulton one of nature’s poor jokes,” Emily retorted. “You overlooked these wonderful good qualities in him until he began to annoy me.”
“Sarcasm does not change the facts.” Mrs. Ainslie was irritated in her even-tempered, indifferent fashion. “You think you’ll wait and look about you. But let me tell you, my dear, precious few girls, even the most eligible of them, have more than one really good chance to marry. Oh, I know what they say. But they exaggerate flirtations into proposals. This business—yes, business—of marrying isn’t so serious a matter with the men as it is with us. And we can’t hunt; we must sit and wait. In this day the stupidest men are crafty enough to see through the subtlest kind of stalking.”
Emily had no reply. She could think of no arguments except those of the heart. And she felt that it would be ridiculous to bring them into the battering and bruising of this discussion.
It was in May that she refused her “good chance.” In June her father fell sick. In mid-July they buried him and drove back from the cemetery to face ruin.
Ruin, in domestic finance, has meanings that range from the borderland of comedy to the blackness beyond tragedy.
The tenement family, thrust into the street and stripped of their goods for non-payment of rent, find in ruin an old acquaintance. They take a certain pleasure in the noise and confusion which their uproarious bewailing and beratings create throughout the neighbourhood. They enjoy the passers-by pausing to pity them, a ragged and squalid group, homeless on the curb. They have been ruined many times, will be ruined many times. They are sustained by the knowledge that there are other tenements, other “easy-payment” merchants. A few hours, a day or two at most, and they are completely reëstablished and are busy making new friends among their new neighbours, exchanging reminiscences of misfortune and rumours of ideal “steady jobs.”
The rich family suddenly ruined has greater shock and sorrow. But usually there are breaks in the fall. A son or a daughter has married well; the head of the family gets business opportunities through rich friends; there is wreckage enough to build up a certain comfort, to make the descent into poverty gradual, almost gentle.