"I don't mind their getting married," she said, "but I want it done decent. I don't intend to pack my daughter off to any man as if she wasn't worth coming after, biscuits or no biscuits!"
She lifted her chin and looked at her companion over the barricade of conventionality that lay between them with the air of one whose position is unassailable. The old woman sighed with much the same air, but with none of her daughter-in-law's satisfaction in it.
"I'm sure I don't know," she said drearily; "sometimes it ain't easy to know your dooty at a glance."
Mrs. Weaver made no response, but her expression was not favorable to such lax uncertainty.
"The way mother Moxom talked," she said to her husband that night, "you'd have thought she sided with Ethel."
Jason Weaver was far too much of a man to hazard an opinion on the proprieties in the face of his wife's disapproval, so he grunted an amiable acquiescence in that spirit of justifiable hypocrisy known among his kind as "humoring the women-folks." Privately he was disposed to exult in his daughter's spirit and good sense, and so long as these admirable qualities did not take her away from him, and paternal pride and affection were both gratified, he saw no reason to complain. This satisfaction, however, did not prevent his "stirring her up" now and then, as he said, that he might sun himself in the glow of her youthful temper and chuckle inwardly over her smartness.
"Well, Dot, how's Rob?" he asked jovially one evening at supper about a month later. "Does he still think he's worth running after?"
"I don't know whether he thinks so or not, but I know he is," asserted the young woman, tilting her chin and looking away from her father with a cool filial contempt for his pleasantries bred by familiarity. "He's well enough, but the old man that lives with him had a fall and broke his leg, and Rob has to take care of him."
Old Mrs. Moxom laid down her knife and fork, and dropped her hands in her lap hopelessly.
"Well, now, what made him go and do that?" she asked, with a fretful quaver in her voice, as if this were the last straw.