"It is easy to talk," she said, "but you don't know what it is to be the richest people in a place like this. Pa and Ma won't let anybody speak to us. I believe it will end in our never getting married at all. We shall be out of the wood before they find their straight stick."
"My dear child, is marriage the end of life? And even if it is, surely the girls who make good wives are those who are content to be the life and brightness of their home circle, and who are not constantly straining their eyes in search of the knight-errant who is to deliver them from Giant Irksome."
In the course of her life in London, Mona had met many girls who chafed at home duties, and longed for a 'sphere,' but a girl who longed for a husband, quâ husband, was so surprising an instance of atavism as to be practically a new type.
Matilda sighed. "You don't know what our home life is," she said. "We pay calls, and people call on us; we go for proper walks along the highroad; we play on the piano and we do crewel-work; we get novels from the library,—and that is all. Just the same thing over and over again."
"And don't you care enough for books and music to find scope in them?"
Matilda shook her head. "Can you read German!" she asked abruptly, looking at Mona's book.
"Yes; do you?"
"No; and I never in my life met any one who could, unless perhaps my German teachers. I took it for three years at school, but I should not know one word in ten now. I wish I did! We had a nice row, I can tell you, when I first came home from school, and Father brought in a German letter from the office one day. He actually expected me to be able to read it!"
"You could easily learn. It only wants a little dogged resolution,—enough to worry steadily through one German story-book with a dictionary. After that the neck of the difficulty is broken."
Matilda made a grimace. "I have only got Bilderbuch," she said, "and I know the English of that by heart, from hearing the girls go over and over it in class. Start me off, and I can go on; but I can scarcely tell you which word stands for moon."