“Oh, don’t talk of being old—’tis horrid to think on. But, my dear, you should really have a little fine breeding, and not be bred up a musty, humdrum Puritan. I do hate those she-precise hypocrites, that go about in close stomachers and ruffles of Geneva print, and cannot so much as cudgel their maids without a Scripture to back them. Nobody likes them, you know. Don’t grow into one of them. You’ll never be married if you do.”
Lettice was silent, but she sat with slightly raised eyebrows, and a puzzled expression about her lips.
“Well, why don’t you speak?” said Gertrude briskly.
“Because I don’t know what to say. I can’t tell what you expect me to say: and you give such queer reasons for not doing things.”
“Do I so?” said Gertrude, looking amused. “Why, what queer reasons have I given?”
“That nobody will like me, and I shall never be married!”
“Well! aren’t they very good reasons?”
“They don’t seem to me to be reasons at all. I may never be married, whether I do it or not; and that will be as God sees best for me, so why trouble myself about it? And as to people not liking me because I am a Puritan, don’t you remember the Lord’s words, ‘If the world hate you, ye know that it hated Me before it hated you’?”
“Oh, you sucked in the Bible with your mother’s milk, I suppose,” said Gertrude pettishly, “and have had it knitted into you ever since by your grandmother’s needles. I did not expect you to be a spoil-sport, Lettice. I thought you would be only too happy to come out of your convent for a few hours.”
“Thank you, I don’t want to be a spoil-sport, and I do not think the Bible is, unless the sports are bad ones, and they might as well be spoiled, might they not?”