"And you, Dolly," pursued Aunt Hester, unruffled, as though a professor addressing a group of freshmen. "And you, Dolly, what are you? A woman. Hence a cling-to."
"A cling-to!" screamed Dolly.
"Certainly. A cling-to. The end of a line of thousands and thousands of cling-tos. For of the women since the beginning of the world, Dolly, which survived? The cling-tos. They alone were able to live, and to have baby-girls who survived—if cling-tos. The others, and the babies of the others, they starved; that's all, Dolly, they starved. No mastodon steak for them, Dolly; no nice wing-bone of ictiosaurus—they starved. So that there are now no others—or mighty few. You, Dolly, being alive and well and a woman, are inevitably a cling-to."
"Auntie! Auntie!" murmured Dolly, puzzled and horrified.
"To recapitulate," Aunt Hester swept on. "To recapitulate: Charles-Norton is a clung-to; you are a cling-to. Neither of you can help him or herself. For it is the very essence of the being of the one to hold, of the other to be held."
"How horrible!" said Dolly, with a shudder.
"In other words, my dears," went on the aunt; "in other words, you are dreadfully in love with each other and can't keep apart."
"Love!" moaned Dolly.
"Love," the aunt repeated firmly.
Dolly rocked for a time; tears again were dropping fast from the end of her eye-lashes. "But he doesn't love me," she wailed at length. "And he isn't a, a—that horrid Chinesy word you call him, and he is gone, gone!"