“I’ve an idea she’ll stay in her cabin now,” I said. “She tells me she has one to herself.” Mrs. Nettlepoint replied that she might do as she liked, and I repeated to her the little conversation I had had with Jasper.
She listened with interest, but “Marry her? Mercy!” she exclaimed. “I like the fine freedom with which you give my son away.”
“You wouldn’t accept that?”
“Why in the world should I?”
“Then I don’t understand your position.”
“Good heavens, I have none! It isn’t a position to be tired of the whole thing.”
“You wouldn’t accept it even in the case I put to him—that of her believing she had been encouraged to throw over poor Porterfield?”
“Not even—not even. Who can know what she believes?”
It brought me back to where we had started from. “Then you do exactly what I said you would—you show me a fine example of maternal immorality.”
“Maternal fiddlesticks! It was she who began it.”