"I'd have no respect for him, if he did," Fred said. "He would be too much like this family—living on dead brains."
Her grandmother turned angry eyes on Mrs. Payton. "You may know what your daughter means, Ellen; I'm sure I don't!"
"I'll tell you what I mean," Frederica said, "you and Mother simply live on the money your husbands made and left you when they died. Since you were a girl, when you had to work because you were poor, you have never done a hand's turn to earn your living. Mother has never done anything. You are both parasites. Well, I am, too; but there's this difference between us: I am ashamed, and you are not. I am trying to do something for myself. But the only thing you two will do for yourselves will be to die." She looked at her speechless grandmother, appraisingly. "Yes, death will be a real thing to you, Grandmother. You can't get anybody else to do your dying for you."
"Ellen! Really!" Mrs. Holmes gasped out.
"Freddy, stop!" her mother said, hysterically.
"Well, what have either of you ever done to earn what you are at this moment eating?" Fred inquired, calmly.
Mrs. Payton was speechless with displeasure, but Mrs. Holmes, shivering from the chill of that word Fred had used, helped herself wildly from a dish Flora had been holding, unnoticed, at her elbow. "Ellen, I simply will not come here, if you allow that girl to speak in this way—before a servant, too!" she added, as Flora retreated to the pantry.
"I merely told the truth," Fred said, with a bored look.
"Well," said her grandmother, "then I will tell you the truth! You are a very unpleasant girl. And I don't wonder you are not married—no man would be such a fool as to ask you! A girl who cheapens herself by locking herself up in empty flats with any young man she happens to meet, and signs indecent petitions, and rants in the public streets to a lot of strikers—why, you are not a lady! You are as plain as a pike-staff; and you have no manners, and no sense, and no heart—you've nothing but cleverness, which is about as attractive to a man as a hair shirt! Maria Spencer told me she expected you would be ruined; but I said I would think better of you if you were capable of being ruined, or if anybody wanted to ruin you. You are not a woman; you are a suffragist! That's why you haven't any charm; not a particle!"