"I don't seem to care any more," replied the girl. "Mother is really in much better health, and has got pretty well prepared to expect almost anything from me. She has become resigned to me as a 'working person.' Then, too, I'm thoroughly inoculated with the habit of doing as I please. I guess that's from being independent and having my own money. What a good thing money is!"
"So long as it means independence," suggested Lorry; "but not after it means dependence."
But Estelle was thinking of their future. The delay, the seemingly endless delay, made her even more impatient than it made him, as is always the case where the woman is really in love. In the man love holds the impetuosity of passion in leash; in the woman it rouses the deeper, the more enduring force of the maternal instinct—not merely the unconscious or, at most, half-conscious longing for the children that are to be, but the desire to do for the man—to look after his health, his physical comfort, to watch over and protect him; for, to the woman in love, the man seems in those humble ways less strong than she—a helpless creature, dependent on her. "It's going to be much harder to wait," said she, "now that you are superintendent and I have bought out Mrs. Hastings's share of my business."
They both laughed, but Lorry said: "It's no joke. A little too much money has made fools of as wise people as we are—many and many's the time."
"Not as wise a person as you are, and as you'll always make me be, or seem to be," replied Estelle.
Lorry pressed his big hand over hers for an instant. "Now that I've left off real work," said he, "I'll soon be able to take your hand without giving you a rough reminder of the difference between us."
He held out his hands, palms upward. They were certainly not soft and smooth, but they more than made up in look of use and strength what they lacked in smoothness. She put her small hands one on either side of his, and they both thrilled with the keen pleasure the touch of edge of hand against edge of hand gave them. In the ends of her fingers were the marks of her needlework. He bent and kissed those slightly roughened finger ends passionately. "I love those marks!" he exclaimed. "They make me feel that we belong to each other."
"I'd be sorry to see your hands different," said she, her eyes shining upon his. "There are many things you don't understand about me—for instance, that it's just those marks of work that make you so dear to me. A woman may begin by liking a man because he's her ideal in certain ways, but once she really cares, she loves whatever is part of him."
In addition to the reasons she had given for feeling "bolder" about her "plebeian" lover, there was another that was the strongest of all. A few months before, a cousin of her father's had died in Boston, where he was the preacher of a most exclusive and fashionable church. He had endeared himself to his congregation by preaching one Easter Sunday a sermon called "The Badge of Birth." In it he proceeded to show from the Scriptures themselves how baseless was the common theory that Jesus was of lowly origin. "The common people heard Him gladly," cried the Rev. Eliot Wilmot, "because they instinctively felt His superiority of birth, felt the dominance of His lineage. In His veins flowed the blood of the royal house of Israel, the blood of the first anointed kings of Almighty God." And from this interesting premise the Reverend Wilmot deduced the divine intent that the "best blood" should have superior rights—leadership, respect, deference. So dear was he to his flock that they made him rich in this world's goods as well as in love and honor. The Wilmots of Saint X had had lively expectations from his estate. They thought that one holding the views eloquently set forth in "The Badge of Birth" must dedicate his fortune to restoring the dignity and splendor of the main branch of the Wilmot family. But, like all their dreams, this came to naught. His fortune went to a theological seminary to endow scholarships and fellowships for decayed gentlemen's sons; he remembered only Verbena Wilmot. On his one visit to the crumbling, weed-choked seat of the head of the house, he had seen Verbena's wonderful hands, so precious and so useless that had she possessed rings and deigned to wear them she would not have permitted the fingers of the one hand to put them on the fingers of the other. The legacy was five thousand dollars, at four per cent., an income of two hundred dollars a year. Verbena invested the first quarterly installment in a long-dreamed-of marble reproduction of her right hand which, after years of thinking daily about the matter, she had decided was a shade more perfect than the left.
If one dim eye makes a man king among blind men—to translate to the vernacular Verbena's elegant reasoning—an income, however trifling, if it have no taint of toil, no stench of sweat upon it, makes its possessor entitled to royal consideration in a family of paupers and dead beats, degraded by harboring a breadwinner of an Estelle. No sudden recipient of a dazzling, drenching shower of wealth was ever more exalted than was Verbena, once in possession of "my legacy." Until the Rev. Eliot Wilmot's posthumous blessing descended upon her, the Wilmots lived together in comparative peace and loving kindness. They were all, except for their mania of genealogy, good-humored, extremely well-mannered people, courteous as much by nature as by deliberate intent. But, with the coming of the blessing, peace and friendliness in that family were at an end. Old Preston Wilmot and Arden railed unceasingly against the "traitor" Eliot; Verbena defended him. Their mother and Estelle were drawn into the battle from time to time, Estelle always against her will. Before Verbena had been a woman of property three months, she was hating her father and brother for their sneers and insults, Arden had gone back to drinking, and the old gentleman was in a savage and most ungentlemanly humor from morning until night.