Queenie Trevalyn did not go into hysterics over her father’s letter, as her mother had done. Instead, she was very angry.
“How dare a man, who has a family on his hands dependent upon him for support, to risk his fortune in speculation?” she stormed. “The man who is mad enough to do it should be sent to an insane asylum, and confined there for the rest of his natural life!”
“But what are we to do, my dear?” queried the weeping mother, in a sobbing, querulous voice. “I have always lived in elegance; how am I to enter a New York boarding house? I—I should fall down dead on the threshold! I ask you, what are we to do, Queenie!”
And off the poor lady went into another violent spasm of hysterics.
“The genteel poor; how I have always pitied them!” went on the sobbing lady, her tears falling afresh. “Poor people who carry about them traces of former greatness. How our set will comment on our downfall, Queenie, and turn their heads the other way as they pass us by on the street; they riding in their carriages, and we tramping through the dust afoot. Oh, I can never endure it, Queenie! I will take to my bed and remain there until the day I die. I have read of poverty in novels, and always pitied the poor heroine. I never imagined that I should one day be in a similar position myself. Oh, dear, if I could have only died ere this dark dawn fell upon us!”
“If you will only dry your tears long enough to listen to what I have to say, and talk the matter over with me, I may be able to suggest a path out of the labyrinth. You have given me no opportunity to tell you a piece of news that may, in your estimation, offset this dreadful calamity.”
Mrs. Trevalyn looked up at her beautiful daughter through her tears.
“Go on, my dear,” she said. “I will listen patiently to anything you may have to say; but I think I can tell, by the way in which you have received the distressing news concerning your father’s failure, just what it is. Mr. Dinsmore has asked you to be his wife.”
“He has, and I have refused him,” replied the daughter, laconically.
“Refused him?” echoed Mrs. Trevalyn, looking at the beauty with dilated eyes. “Refused him—while every one is sure that he must be worth barrels of money?”