“So far ahead of them in every way.”
“Ahead of Charley Putney?” said I, jocose but jealous withal.
She laughed with a delightful look of contemptuous scorn in her cute face. “Oh, he!” she scoffed. “He’s getting only eight a week, and he’ll never get any more.”
“Not if his boss has sense,” said I, thinking myself judicial. “But let’s talk about ourselves. We can be married now.”
I advanced this timidly, for being a truly-in-love lover I was a little afraid of her, a little uncertain of this priceless treasure. But she answered promptly, “Yes, I was thinking of that.”
“Let’s do it right away,” proposed I.
“Oh, not for several weeks. It wouldn’t be proper.”
“Why not?”
She couldn’t explain. She only knew that there was something indecent about haste in such matters, that the procedure must be slow and orderly and stately. “We’ll marry the first of next month,” she finally decided, and I joyfully acquiesced.
Some of my readers—both of the gentle and of the other kind—may be surprised that a girl of seventeen should be so self-assured, so independent. They must remember that she was a daughter of the people; and among the people a girl of seventeen was, and I suppose still is, ready for marriage, ready and resolved to decide all important matters for herself. At seventeen Edna, in self-poise and in experience, judgment and all the other mature qualities, was the equal of the carefully sheltered girl of twenty-five or more. She may have been brought up a lady, may have been in all essential ways as useless as the most admired of that weariful and worthless class. But the very nature of her surroundings, in that simple household and that simple community, had given her a certain practical education. And I may say here that to it she owes all she is to-day. Do not forget this, gentle reader, as you read about her and as she dazzles you. As you look at the gorgeous hardy rose do not forget that such spring only from the soil, develop only in the open.