“Are you not yet used to our wicked Gotham?” asked Quintard, taking a chair beside her.
“No!” Miss Starbruck had recovered her voice. “And I think it abominable that the holy institution of matrimony should be so defamed.”
“Oh, dear Miss Starbruck,” cried Helen, good-naturedly. “It is time you left Nantucket. That primitive saying has long since been paraphrased into ‘the unholy institution of whithersoever thou goest, in the other direction will I run.’ And a jolly good revolution it is, too. Please do not call me immoral, dear Miss Starbruck. You and I were born on different planets, that is all.”
“Marriage is a necessary evil,” said Mrs. Dykman’s soft, monotonous voice. “You have done well to defer it as long as possible, but you are wise to contemplate a silken halter. No woman’s position is established, nor has she any actual importance until she has a husband. But marry nothing under a million, my dear. Take the advice of one who knows; money is the one thing that makes life worth living. Everything else goes—youth, beauty, love. Money—if you take care that does not go too—consoles for the loss of all, because it buys distractions, amusement, power, change. It plates ennui and crystallizes tears to diamonds. It smoothes wrinkles and keeps health in the cheek. It buys friends and masks weakness and sin. You are young, but the young generation is wiser than the old; my advice, I feel sure, will not be thrown away.”
“And this!” exclaimed Miss Starbruck, hoarsely; “this is what life has come to! I am an old maid, and have done with all thought of marriage; but I am not ashamed to say that many years ago I loved a young man, and had he lived would have married him, and been a true and faithful and loving wife. That a woman should marry from any other motive seems to me scandalous and criminal.”
“What do truth and duty mean?” demanded Hermia scornfully. “Monotony and an ennui worse than death. You are happy that you live your married life in imagination, and that your lover died before even courtship had begun to pall. Still”—she shrugged her shoulders as she thought of Bessie—“perhaps you wouldn’t have minded it; some people don’t.”
“No,” said her aunt; “I wouldn’t have minded it. I would have appreciated it.”
Hermia turned to her with a curious glance. “How differently people are made,” she said with a sigh. “The monotony of married life would drive me mad.”
Quintard rose and rested his elbow on the mantel. “Did it ever occur to you,” he said, “that monotony is not an absolutely indispensable ingredient of married life?”
Hermia shrugged her shoulders. “It ruins more wedded lives than jealousy or bad temper.”