Aunt Hester opened her mouth like a fish suddenly whisked out of water. She closed it again. By the time she spoke, she had suppressed something. "No, no, Dolly," she said. "Darwin, the—well, it doesn't matter. We've been reading him lately, anyway, at the Cooking Club. That chap knows things, Dolly. He didn't tell me anything I didn't know ahead myself; but he explained lots of things I had found out. You should read him."
"I'll read him, Auntie," said Dolly, with dolorous voice. "I suppose I'll have to read now, or paint china, or do something like that, now that Charles, that Charles, that Charles——"
"Oh, Charles, Charles, Charles," echoed Aunt Hester, but in much different tone; "you'll get your Charles back. Charles-Norton! He has as much chance to escape you—as the earth has to stop whirling around. You baby! Why, you've got all Nature on your side, plotting and scheming for you. His dice are loaded; he can't win!"
"Aunty, what are you talking about! Here I am, un-unhappy, and needing, needing, needing friendship, and you sit and talk—I don't know what."
"For, what is Charles-Norton?" continued the Boston lady, as though she had not heard Dolly. "What is Charles-Norton? A man. Hence, a clung-to."
"A clung-to!" exclaimed Dolly, a dreadful suspicion beginning to add itself to her greater trouble.
"Just so—a clung-to. And the direct heir of hundreds and hundreds and thousands and thousands of clung-tos. For of the men since the beginning of the world, Dolly, it's only the clung-tos that survived, or rather that had babies that survived——"
"Auntie!" admonished Dolly.
"Certainly," went on Aunt Hester, seemingly misinterpreting Dolly's interruption. "They alone had babies that survived. The babies of the others—well, they starved, or fell into the fire, or were massacred in the wars. So that now there are no others. There are only descendants of clung-tos, and hence clung-tos. Charles-Norton, Dolly, is a clung-to!"
"But, Auntie," protested Dolly, "he isn't any horrid such thing. And he's gone, he's gone—and I certainly won't force him to——"