“Nay, I go not about to pray that ill be avoided from those companions,” retorted Blanche in scorn. “They may drown, every man of them, for aught I care.”
“They be some woman’s childre, every man,” was Barbara’s reply.
“O Blanche!” interposed Clare, reproachfully. “Do but think of their childre at home: and the poor mothers that are watching in the villages of Spain for their lads to come back to them! How canst thou wish them hurt?”
“How touching a picture!” said Blanche in the same tone.
“In very deed, I would not by my good-will do them none ill,” responded Barbara; “I would but pray and endeavour myself that they should do none ill to me.”
“How should they do thee ill, an’ they were drowned?” laughed Blanche.
The girl was not speaking her real sentiments. She was neither cruel nor flinty-hearted, but was arguing and opposing, as she often did, sheerly from a spirit of contradiction, and a desire to astonish her little world; Blanche’s vanity was of the Erostratus character. While she longed to be liked and admired, she would have preferred that people should think her disagreeable, rather than not think of her at all.
“But, Blanche,” deprecated Clare, who did not enter into this peculiarity of her sister, “do but fancy, if one of these very men did seek thy gate, all wet and weary and hungered, and it might be maimed in the storm, without so much as one penny in his pocket for to buy him fire and meat—thou wouldst not shut the door in his face?”
“Nay, truly, for I would take a stout cudgel and drive him thence.”
“O Blanche!”