"Poor, poor Eva Van Arsdel! how art thou fallen!" said I.
"Poor Aunt Maria!" said Eva. "I honestly and truly am sorry for her. She really loves me in her way—the way most people love you, which is to want you to be happy in doing as they please. Her heart was set on my making an astoundingly rich match, and having a wedding that should eclipse all former weddings, and then becoming a leader of fashionable society; and to have me fail of all this is a dreadful catastrophe. I want somehow to comfort her and make up with her, but she can't forgive me. She kissed me at last with a stern and warning air that seemed to say: 'Well, if you will go to destruction, I can't help it.'"
"Perhaps when she sees how happy we are, she will get over it," said I.
"No, I fear not. Aunt Maria can't conceive of anybody's being happy that has to begin life with an ingrain carpet on the floor. She would think it a positive indecorum to be happy under such circumstances—a want of a proper sense of the fitness of things. Now, I propose to be very happy under precisely those circumstances, and to try to make you so; consequently you see I shall offend her moral sense continuously, and, as I said, I do wish it weren't so, because I love Aunt Maria, and am sorry I can't please her."
"I suppose," said I, "there is no making her comprehend the resources we have in each other—our love of just this bright, free, natural life?"
"Oh dear, no! All Aunt Maria's idea of visiting the mountains would be having rooms at the Profile House in the height of the season, and gazing in full dress at the mountains from the verandahs. I don't think she really cares enough for any thing here to risk wetting her feet for it. I dare say the poor dear soul is lying awake nights now, lamenting over my loss of what I don't care for, and racking her brains how we may contrive to patch up a little decent gentility."
"And you are as free and gay as an oriole!"
"Certainly I am. All I wish is that we could live in one of these little mountain towns, just as your mother and uncle do. I love the hearty, simple society here."
"Well," said I, "as we cannot, we can only try to make a home in New York, as simple-hearted, and kindly, and unworldly as if we lived here."