"But haven't I consented to send cards to her, Margaret?"
"Yes. And I'm sure that a man who loves children as you do, who gives money to charities and the church, as you tell me you do, couldn't be thoughtless of the aged. I don't want to believe you could."
"No, indeed! I gave one hundred dollars last year to our U. B. Church Home for Old Ladies." He drew out his purse, extracted a newspaper clipping, and passed it to her, "My name heads the list, you see."
"Oh, Daniel, and you were going to neglect to send an announcement of your wedding to the 'aged, inoffensive, kind-hearted, but useless and burdensome' widow of your father!"
"But, Margaret," he protested, his self-esteem wincing at her disapproval, "if ever you see her, you'll not blame me! You'll understand. Anyway, family sentiment among you Southerners is so much stronger, I've always been told, than with us in the North."
"I'm sure it must be."
"My step-mother is too poor, too, to send us a wedding present," he added as a mitigating reason for his "neglect."
Margaret, having no conception of his penuriousness (he seemed so lavishly generous to her), took such speeches as this for a childish simplicity, the eccentricity of legal genius, perhaps. Had she known that he actually felt it wasteful to invest an expensively engraved card and a stamp where there would be no return of any kind, she would have advised him to consult an alienist.
Little did she and Daniel dream that the sending of that wedding announcement to old Mrs. Leitzel of Martz Township was going to make history for the entire Leitzel family.