“Oh, well, my dear—if you are going to judge a man by the way he ties knots—”
Mrs. Lauderdale laughed as she broke off in her incomplete sentence. Then her face grew grave all at once.
“Take my advice, my child—marry him,” she said, bending over her table once more and taking up a little brush, as though she wished to end the interview.
“Certainly not!” answered Katharine, in a tone which discouraged further persuasion.
Mrs. Lauderdale sighed.
“Well—I don’t know what you young girls expect,” she said, in a tone of depression. “Mr. Wingfield’s young, good-looking, well-educated, rich, and he adores you. Perhaps you don’t love him precisely, but you can’t help liking him. You act as though you were always expecting a fine, irresistible, mediæval passion to come and carry you off. It won’t, you know. That sort of thing doesn’t happen any more. When you want to get married at last, you’ll be too old. You have your choice of almost any of them. For a girl who has no money and isn’t likely to have much for a long time, I don’t know any one who’s more surrounded than you are. Of course I want you to marry. I don’t believe in waiting till you’re twenty-five or thirty.”
“I don’t intend to.”
“Well, you will, my dear, unless you make up your mind soon. It’s all—”
“Mother,” interrupted Katharine, “you know very well that I’ve made my choice, and that I mean to stand by it.”
“Oh—Jack Ralston, you mean?” Mrs. Lauderdale affected a rather contemptuous indifference. “That was a foolish affair. Girls always fall in love with their cousins. You’ll forget all about him, and I’m sure he’s forgotten all about you. He hardly ever comes to the house now. Besides, you never could have married poor Jack, with his dissipated habits, and no money. Uncle Robert doesn’t mean to leave him anything. He’d gamble it all away.”