"Then don't say it!" now sharply rang Pauline's retort.
"Ah! you lose your temper? It is just what I might have thought—under the circumstances!"
Pauline clenched her teeth together for a short space, to keep from any futile disclosure of anger. And presently she said, with a shrill yet even directness,—
"What, pray, are the circumstances? I tell you that I am to marry the man whom I choose to marry. You advised me—you nearly forced me, once—to marry the man whom it was an outrage to make my husband!"
"Pauline!"
"What I tell you is true! He whom I select is not of your world! And, by the way, what is your world? A little throng of mannerists, snobs, and triflers! I care nothing for such a world! I want a larger and a better. You say that I have failed in my effort to break down this barrier of conservatism which hedged me about from my birth.... Well, allow that I have failed in that! I have not failed in finding some true gold from all that you sneer at as tawdry dross!... Tawdry! I did well to chance upon the word! What was that gentlemanly bit of vice whom you were so willing I should marry a few years ago? You've just aired your tenets to me; I'll air a few of mine to you now. We live in New York, you and I. Do you know what New York means? It means what America means—or what America ought to mean, from Canada to the Gulf! And that is—exemption from the hateful bonds of self-glorifying snobbery which have disgraced Europe for centuries! You call yourself an aristocrat. How dare you do so? You dwell in a land which was washed with the blood, less than a century ago, of men who died to kill just what you boast of and exalt! Look more to your breeding and your brains, and less to your so-called caste! I come of your own race, and can speak with right about it. What was it, less than four generations ago? You call it Dutch, and with a grand air. It flowed in the veins of immigrant Dutchmen, who would have opened their eyes with wonder to see the mansion you dwell in, the silver forks you eat with! They dwelt in wooden shanties and ate with pewter forks.... Your objection to my marriage with Ralph Kindelon is horrible—that and nothing more! He towers above the idiot whom you are glad to have Sallie marry! What do I care for the little 'lord'? You bow before it; I despise it. You call my project, my dream, my desire, a failure ... I grant that it is. But it is immeasurably above that petty worship of the Golden Calf, which you name respectability and which I denounce as only a pitiful sham! The world is growing older, but you don't grow old with it. You close your eyes to all progress. You get a modish milliner, you keep your pew in Grace Church, you drop a big coin into the plate when a millionaire hands it to you, and you are content. Your contentment is a pitiful fraud. Your purse could do untold good, and yet you keep it clasped—or, if you loose the clasp, you do it with a flourish, a vogue, an éclat.... Mrs. Amsterdam has done the same for this or that asylum or hospital, and so you, with fashionable acquiescence, do likewise. And you—you, Cynthia Poughkeepsie, who tried to wreck my girlish life and almost succeeded—you, who read nothing of what great modern minds in their grandly helpful impulse toward humanity are trying to make humanity hear—you, who think the fit set of a patrician's gown above the big struggle of men and women to live—you, who immerse yourself in idle vanities and talk of everyone outside your paltry pale as you would talk of dogs—you dare to upbraid me because I announce to you that I will marry a man whom power of mind makes your superior, and whom natural gifts of courtesy make far more than your equal!"
As Pauline hotly finished she saw her aunt recede many steps from her.
"Oh, this—this is frightful!" gasped Mrs. Poughkeepsie. "It—it is the theatre! You will go on the stage, I suppose. It seems to me you have done everything but go on the stage, already! That would be the crowning insult to yourself—to your family!"
"I shan't go on the stage," shot Pauline, "because I have no talent for it. If I had talent, perhaps I would go. I think it a far better life for an American woman than to prate triumphantly about marrying her daughter to a titled English fool!"
Mrs. Poughkeepsie uttered a cry, at this point. She passed from the room, and Pauline, overcome with the excess of her disclaimer, soon afterward sank upon a chair....