"So much," answered her mother, smiling but grave, "that I should lock you into the cellar on a bread-and-water diet, at the first hint of such a thing! Understand me, I forbid it absolutely. You may put this nonsense out of your head."
Kate had rarely occasion to speak to her children in such a tone, and Jacqueline looked at her, rather frightened. But she said nothing.
"Why, Jacqueline, little daughter, why should you spend your youth and your loveliness on a public that will cast you aside like an old glove when it is worn out? No, no, there's a larger purpose for you in life than any mere career. Careers are for the women who miss the other things, and who use in default the best they have. Fame, bah! It does not outlast a generation—or if it does, you will not know it. What you have to give will outlast many generations, will never die, will become part of the muscle and sinew and back-bone of your nation. Sons! Big, clean, lusty, well-born children!—Why, don't you suppose you and my clever Jemima—yes, and even my little crippled Katharine—were better gifts for me to bring the world than a mere passing pleasure in my voice?—Ah, Jacky, there's just one career open to women like you and me. You know very well what it is."
The girl was oddly stirred. When her mother spoke like this, she always thought, for some reason, of a statue she had never seen, a great bronze Liberty, with torch aloft, lighting into her safe harbor the ships of all the world.
But she said, after a moment, "You put me on a par with Mag Henderson, Mother. Has she fulfilled the purpose of her creation, then?"
Kate was startled anew. Jacqueline in the rôle of thinker was unexpected. But she answered, honestly as always, "I believe she has. Nature often makes use of unworthy vessels to accomplish her own ends—poor little vessels! Mag is waste, perhaps. Her child will not be waste.—I'll see to that. So the balance of economy is kept.—But you are no unworthy vessel, Jacqueline, thank God!"
The girl went to the window and stood looking out, over the garden that merged into a pasture, and so down gradually into the ravine where the ruined slave-house stood.
"Suppose," she asked in a muffled voice, "suppose I couldn't marry? What then?"
Kate believed she understood. The affair with Channing had left more of a hurt than she had realized. Jacqueline, at seventeen, doubtless considered herself a blighted being.—She controlled the smile that twitched at her lips, and said cheerfully, "Then you will just have to be a prop for my declining years. You won't begrudge me a prop, dear? Surely you don't want to go away from me?"
The unconscious emphasis on the pronoun went to Jacqueline's heart. She remembered the day Jemima had shut them out into the world of people who were not Kildares, she and her mother together....