"Now tell mother all about it. What put such a strange idea into your wise little old pate? Not Jim himself—I'm sure of that."
"Oh, no!—But it isn't a strange idea," protested the muffled voice from her lap. "I don't want to be an old maid—" (sniff, sniff). "He hasn't asked me yet, exactly—but he would if he were quite sure you didn't want him—" (sob). "And I'm twenty years old, now. I want to be married, like other women."
"Only twenty years old!" repeated her mother, gently.
"Oh, I know it sounds young, but it isn't always as young as it sounds" said the girl with unconscious pathos. "Look at me, Mother—I'm older than you, right now! I don't believe I ever was very young."
"But you may be yet," said Kate. "With your first lover, your first baby—Ah, child, child, you must not run the risk of marrying without love! You don't know what love can do to you."
"Yes, I do," whispered Jemima.
"What! You can't tell me you're in love with old Jim?"
The girl sat erect, and propounded certain decided views of hers on love and marriage as earnestly as if her little nose were not pink with embarrassed tears, and her eyes swimming with them like a troubled baby's.
"Being in love doesn't seem as important to me as it does to some people. Of course it's necessary, or the world would not go on. There has to be some sort of glamour to—to make things possible.—But I'm sure it's not a comfortable feeling to live with, any more than hunger would be.—Being in love does quite as much harm as good, anyway. Half the crimes in the world are the result of it, and all the unnecessary children. I don't want love, Mother! It hurts, and it makes fools of otherwise intelligent persons. I shouldn't like, ever, to lose my self-control.—And the feeling doesn't last! Look at you, for instance. I suppose once you were in love with my father?"
Kate nodded.