“Now pray don’t excite yourself,” said Laurentia with an icy smile. “After he had confessed his attachment to you—I opened to him the prospect, not only of obtaining your father’s consent—”
“Oh, mother, dear, how kind of you,” now sighed the young girl as she covered Laurentia’s face with kisses.
Laurentia gently put her aside and resumed: “I opened to him not only the prospect of gaining your father’s consent; but I further proposed to him a means of greatly improving his own position, and of thus making his marriage with a girl like you, more possible.”
“A girl like me?” asked Anna in surprise. “Am I then unlike all other girls that a marriage with me would be less possible?”
“My dear child,” said Laurentia, “listen to reason. You know that from your childhood you have been brought up in the midst of a certain degree of luxury,—now surely you would not like to renounce all these comforts, to which you have been born and bred and—”
“For the man I love I would sacrifice anything!” eagerly cried the girl.
“Yes, I know,” replied Laurentia coldly, “all that reads very well in a novel; but you will not find that it will stand the test of experience. In practical everyday life the saying is but too true: ‘When poverty enters at the door, love flies out at the window.’ ”
“Oh!” cried Anna, “there is no fear of that with me and Charles.”
“That is all very fine,” continued Laurentia, “but we, your parents, we who have to entrust your future happiness to a husband, we must take care that that husband can offer you a home free from the anxieties of poverty. Now we were in hopes that we might have met Mr. van Nerekool half way in this matter—But—”
“But—what mamma? oh, tell me what he said.”