"Don't be angry, Belle, at my saying so, but you've only yourself to thank for that. You've been most anxious that Mary should be just like one of ourselves—should not feel that she was accepting charity, and you've succeeded only too well. The girl takes everything you do for her as her right, and asks for more."
"Well, what about Boston?"
"I think it would be arrant folly to send her there. How do we know she has any more talent for elocution than for music?"
"She has the desire to learn. I suppose that's a sign of the ability."
"She has an intense desire for admiration, that's about the size of it. To be the center of all eyes, giving a recitation in a drawing room, pleases her down to the ground, but it doesn't follow that she would be a success professionally."
"I dare say we've spent about as much on her education as you care to do just now."
"We have indeed!"
My wife and I are much in demand at all the social functions of our town, and, though I accompany her under protest, I confess that, once the affair is in full swing, I enjoy as much as anybody a hand at "Pedro" or a dance.
The houses of our city are mostly wooden and mostly new, for an annual conflagration keeps building brisk. Hardwood floors and mantels are the order of the day, and if some of our lumbermen and their wives have not a command of English grammar in keeping with their horses, their sealskins, and their diamonds, they have a heartier than an English welcome—except, of course, for guests of such questionable antecedents as our Mary.
Mrs. David Gemmell is a bright and witty woman, though I say it, who should not. But why should I not? She did not inherit her wits from me. Mrs. David Gemmell let the leading ladies of the town understand that unless Mary was invited to everything that was going on, we stayed away ourselves. Lake City society could not proceed without Isabel, so the "white elephant" was received in her train, and truly she did us credit in company, if nowhere else. She was always stylishly dressed, and her dancing was a joy forever. We did not marvel when Will Axworthy, the most eligible young man about, took it into his head to introduce the german to our benighted citizens, that he chose Mary for his partner to lead it with him. She had private lessons from himself, as well as from the dancing master, and proud and happy were Belle and I to sit at the side of the ballroom and watch her going through the figures and bestowing her favors with all the grace and dignity of one of the four hundred.