"Why, you would be a heroine. Every old lover, of whom there are so many eligible ones, would feel his zeal return. A romance would attend your name wherever the Baltimore newspapers are taken, and you would be as great a heroine as Betty Patterson."
"That disobedient girl?" Vesta, still in astonishment, exclaimed.
"I saw her when the bride of Jerome Bonaparte. She was not half as lovely as you! If Jerome had seen you—you were not born, then, and I was in society—he would never have looked at Betty. But, you see, she forced a settlement out of the Emperor, husbanded the income of it, and she is rich, and freer to-day than if she had become a French Bonaparte."
"Weak as they may be in many things, I am a Custis," Vesta spoke, with pale scorn. "I would not drag my name through the tobacco-stained lobbies of Annapolis to wear the crown of Josephine. The word I gave, in pity of my parents, to the man who is now my husband, to become his wife, I would not take back to my dying day, unless he first denied his word. I believe there is such a thing as honor yet. Mother, you fret my father by such principles."
"They are the principles of your uncle, Allan McLane."
"A man I shrink from," Vesta said, "although he is your brother. His unfeeling respectability, his unchangeableness, his want of every impulse but hate, his appropriation of our family honor, as if he was our lawgiver and high-sheriff, his secretiveness, formal religion, and mysterious prosperity, I do not appreciate, much as I have tried to be charitable to him. I do not like Baltimore as I do the Eastern Shore; it is fierce, hard, and suspicious."
"You shall not run down Baltimore before me," Mrs. Custis cried, hotly. "It is a paradise to this region; and comparing Meshach Milburn to your uncle is blasphemy."
"I have on my finger, mother, his mother's ring."
"A pretty object it is," said Mrs. Custis, taking a peep at it and another at her check; "it requires a microscope to find it. The next thing you will be walking through Baltimore on your bridal tour, followed by a mob of small boys, to see Meshach's old steeple-top hat. Then I shall feel for you, Vesta."
The cruel blow struck home. Vesta's reception, so unexpected, so acrimonious, affected her with a sense of gross ingratitude, and with a greater disappointment—she had failed to restore joy to her parents by her desperate sacrifice.