"Her head is full of the novels she reads!"
"You can't keep me from thinking like a woman. Feeling like one. Is it shameful to want to love? Is it wrong to desire in the man you are to marry that fundamental passion that makes the world go around? I'm not supposed to know any thing about the thing I'm plunging into until after I've plunged! I'm afraid, papa. Save me!"
"Ben, I could swear who is at the bottom of this indecent talk of hers. I found his picture cut out of the school magazine and pasted in her diary. She's a changed child since that Lindsley came to the High School the year before she graduated."
"Mamma! Mamma!" fairly exploded to her feet by the potency of her sense of outrage. "Oh, you—you—"
"I know I'm right."
"Why, I haven't even seen him since I graduated! I've never talked ten words to the man in my life! Oh—oh—how can you?"
"Just the same, he's been your ruination. Since you got him into your head not one of the boys you met has been good enough. I knew you had him in mind the day you told me you wished Albert was a little more bookish and musical. I know why you wanted him to subscribe to the Symphony. The spats you made him buy. Poor boy! and his ankles aren't cut for them. Love! Your father and I weren't so much in love, let me tell you. Only I knew my parents wanted it and that was enough. I wish to God I'd never lived to see this day—"
"Carrie!"
"I do. Noon of my daughter's wedding day, and she can't make up her mind whether she'll be married or not. O God! it's funny—love, now at the last minute—oh—oh—" A geyser of hysteria shot up, raining down in a glassy kind of laugh. "Oh—oh, it's funny!—love—"
"Carrie, you're hysterical. Here, smell this ammonia."