“Who?” demanded Nat, in alarm.
“You know that I am a poor girl. Not only that, but I do not come from the same stock that you do. There is no blue blood in my veins,” and she uttered a little laugh that might have sounded bitter had there not been the tremor of tears in it.
“What nonsense, Tavia!” the young man cried, shaking her gently by the shoulders.
“Oh no, Nat! Wait! I am a poor girl and I come of very, very common stock. I don’t mean I am ashamed of my poverty, or of the fact that my father and mother both sprang from the laboring class.
“But you might be expected when you marry to take for a wife a girl from a family whose forebears were something. Mine were not. Why, one of my grandfathers was an immigrant and dug ditches——”
“Pshaw! I had a relative who dug a ditch, too. In Revolutionary times——”
“That is it exactly,” Tavia hastened to say. “I know about him. He helped dig the breastworks on Breeds Hill and was wounded in the Battle of Bunker Hill. I know all about that. Your people were Pilgrim and Dutch stock.”
“Immigrants, too,” said Nat, muttering. “And maybe some of them left their country across the seas for their country’s good.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said the shrewd Tavia. “Being an immigrant in America in sixteen hundred is one thing. Being an immigrant in the latter end of the nineteenth century is an entirely different pair of boots.”
“Oh, Tavia!”