“I cannot tell if you will think it good or not, Aunt,” said Flora. “He says that very few give their lives to or for any cause. They nearly always give them for a person.”
“Mr Keith must be a hero of chivalry,” drawled Mr Parmenter, showing his white teeth in a lazy laugh.
(Why do people always simper when they have fine teeth?)
“Chivalry ought to be another name for Christian courage and charity,” saith my Aunt Kezia. “Ay, child—Mr Keith is right. It is a pity it isn’t always the right person.”
“How are you to know you have found the right person, Aunt?” said Hatty, in her pert way.
My Aunt Kezia looked round at her in her awful fashion. Then she said, gravely, “You will find, Hatty, you have always got the wrong one, unless you aim at the Highest Person of all.”
I heard Cecilia whisper to Mr Parmenter, “Oh, dear! is she going to preach a sermon?” and he hid a laugh under a yawn. Somebody else heard it too.
“Mrs Kezia’s sermons are as short as some parsons’ texts,” said Ephraim, quietly, and not in a whisper.
“But you would not say,” observed Mr Parmenter, without indicating to whom he addressed himself, “that this cause, now—ha—of which we were speaking,—that the lives, I mean—ha—were sacrificed to any particular person?”
“I never saw one plainer, if you mean me,” said my Aunt Kezia, bluntly. “What do nine-tenths of the men care about monarchy or commonwealth—absolute kings or limited ones—Stuart or Hanoverian? They just care for Prince Charles, and his fine person and ringing voice, and his handsome dress: what else? And the women are worse than the men. Some men will give their lives for a cause, but you don’t often see a woman do it. Mostly, with women, it is father or brother, lover or husband, that carries the day: at least, if you have seen women of another sort, they haven’t come my way.”