“Then I will teach you that I also can be firm. I command you to break off this foolish, insane affair at once.”
“I won't!” said Nannie.
“Ungrateful minx!” cried Mrs. Lamont. “Here I have dressed you all these years and gone to no end of other expense, and this is how you repay me.”
“It is,” said Nannie.
Now, Mrs. Lamont was a shrewd, worldly woman, and she took in the situation fully. She realized that Nannie would hold to her own course. She also realized that arguments such as hers were without weight with Steve. These two, then, would marry for all she could say or do, for Nannie was just come of age. Now she had already strained her means to provide for the fashionable necessities of Nannie's début and society life, and she dreaded her wedding. Had the child married well, however, all the monetary effort attendant upon the occasion could have been repaid afterward—all that and more; but now to have an outlay and no return—that was too much! She would avert it.
“I can do nothing with this saucy, impudent girl, this ungrateful creature, but I appeal to you,” she said to Steve, “to let her come to her senses.”
It was Mrs. Lamont, he thought, who was worse than mad to try to force a young girl into an odious marriage, and Nannie's rebellion seemed justifiable to him, unused though he himself was to defying any one.
“Nannie and I have decided,” he said quietly. “I regret that you feel so.”
“You shall never be married from this house!” cried the aunt.
“We can go elsewhere,” said Steve, not realizing that he was walking into a net.