Katherine dropped her head. She had probably often dropped it so in the past before her aunt. “You know,” she said, softly apologetic, “I never did read the papers as you do, Aunt Katherine, or keep up with current events.”
Aunt Katherine laughed. It was a nice laugh. Kate visualized their brook in Ashland, when the ice was dissolving under the sun in the spring. (Yes, she did. It may seem a strange time for her mind to wander so far, but the fact remains. She saw the brook that zigzagged through the meadows back of their barn-house, as she had seen it last spring, its edges still frosted with ice, but down the centre the clear, laughing water coursing.)
“Well, the news of Nick would hardly come under ‘current events’,” Aunt Katherine was saying. “But I do remember now that you never did take a proper interest in the papers. It never entered my head, though, that you wouldn’t have learned of this from a dozen sources.”
Kate had been backing away toward the door, meaning to go for Elsie. But there was no need. Elsie had heard her father’s voice the minute he had come into the drawing-room. She had stolen down into the room now, and gripped Kate’s hand. Together the two girls moved back toward the three who were earnestly talking, still standing near the open door with the rain, all unobserved, discolouring the polished floor.
Aunt Katherine was asking Katherine another question. “Why didn’t you take Nick seventeen years ago?” she asked. “You seem sure enough of yourself now. He wasn’t good enough for you then. Is he good enough now after all that has happened?”
Again Katherine cried, “How can you!” But quickly she amended it. “Yes, you have a right. You know yourself, Aunt Katherine, what was the matter with me. It was pride of birth, blindness, love of luxury, Mrs. Van Vorst-Smith’s head-shakings, a jumble of folly. You know perfectly what sort of a girl I was. But now I’m different. Now I’m nearer to being good enough for Nick.”
“Love of luxury!” Miss Frazier picked on that. “You want me to believe your horrid description of yourself? If you loved luxury so much, why have you been living as you have all these years, accepting nothing of the luxuries I longed to give you?”
“But I tell you I changed. At twenty-two I was different from nineteen. I welcomed poverty then. When they told me that Kate and I had actually nothing to live on, I was delighted.”
“So it has been by way of penance, your hard life since?”
“If you want to call it that. It’s been fun, too.”