"Oh, he wanted to worry me all right, there's no doubt about that," he replied.
"He hasn't spoken to me when he could help it for twenty years," pursued his aunt, who was so possessed by the idea of her own relation to her husband that she was incapable of dwelling upon any other.
"I wouldn't talk about it, mother, if I were you," said Susan with resolute cheerfulness.
"I don't know why I shouldn't talk about it. It's all I've got to talk about," returned Mrs. Treadwell peevishly; and she added with smothered resentment, "Even my children haven't been any comfort to me since they were little. They've both turned against me because of the way their father treats me. James hardly ever has so much as a word to say to me."
"But I do, mother. How can you say such an unkind thing to me?"
"You never do the things that I want you to. You know I'd like you to go out and enjoy yourself and have attention as other girls do."
"You are disappointed because I'm not a belle like Abby Goode or Jinny Pendleton," said Susan with the patience that is born of a basic sense of humour. "But I couldn't help that, could I?"
"Any girl in my day would have felt badly if she wasn't admired," pursued Mrs. Treadwell with the venom of the embittered weak, "but I don't believe you'd care a particle if a man never looked at you twice."
"If one never looked at me once, I don't see why you should want me to be miserable about it," was Susan's smiling rejoinder; "and if the girls in your day couldn't be happy without admiration, they must have been silly creatures. I've a life of my own to live, and I'm not going to let my happiness depend on how many times a man looks at me." In the clear light of her ridicule, the spectre of spinsterhood, which was still an object of dread in the Dinwiddie of the eighties, dissolved into a shadow.
"Well, we've about finished, I believe," remarked Oliver, closing the case over which he was stooping, and devoutly thanking whatever beneficent Powers had not created him a woman. "I'll send for these sometime to-morrow, Aunt Belinda."