A sense of deference to the dead prompted Mrs. Deane to protest against her daughter’s accepting the appointment. They talked at one another across an abyss that widened daily and separated them.
“You shouldn’t do it, Azalea,” she cried. “It doesn’t seem right. You’re disobeying your father when he’s scarcely cold in the grave . . . It isn’t as though you didn’t know that . . . I mean, I suppose it wouldn’t be so bad if he had been dead a long time . . .”
“Disobedience is a matter of principle, not time, mother!” returned the girl. “Don’t you see that I have no choice? We can’t live without the equivalent of father’s superannuation allowance!”
“Well, I’m sure I don’t know what to do,” Mrs. Deane whimpered, “Business is so difficult for a woman to grasp . . . Oh, Azalea, if he knows it, he will be so dreadfully annoyed! Isn’t there some other way? If you had only been married . . .”
“Please, mother, let’s not go into that! I’m sorry to have disappointed you, but for myself, I haven’t a single regret. I don’t look upon marriage as the only solution of a woman’s financial problems, you know.”
“It’s a convenient one,” argued Mrs. Deane, rather more pertinently than usual. “There are the girls . . . they don’t have to work.”
“If they don’t, then they are cheating their husbands,” cried Azalea, purposely misunderstanding. “And too many married women who don’t cheat their husbands are being cheated—like you,” she nearly ended.
“Oh, my child!”
“I can’t look upon marriage as a refuge from the dangers that beset a female traveller on the Sea of Life. To me it is a tricky craft that may play you false as it operates between the two inescapable ports of Birth and Death.”
“And you are our baby, too,” sighed Mrs. Deane, as irrelevantly as Mrs. Nickleby.