"You'd never imagine dad belonged to the same family."
"Anybody could see they did. They're very much alike. Martha, you don't do your father justice. You wait till you get into trouble and you'll see whether he's a good friend or not."
"Yes. Well, maybe I won't get into trouble. There's no certainty. I know now very well what he'd do. He'd do anything he could for me because I'm your little pet."
"You're a ridiculous child, Martha."
"I know that. You say that whenever you don't want to acknowledge I've hit the nail on the head."
"I said plainly your dad is of another temperament."
"I'll say he is!"
"Isn't life too funny?" thought Emily. "Jim's boy has spoiled Bob for Martha, and Jim makes Bob seem uninteresting to Martha. Things go too much in circles in the family," she thought to herself. And Emily sat there, not listening closely to Martha's chatter. She was thinking about her startling question. Could Martha really have wondered about that when she was eight? What was the use of imagining one saw into a child's mind! Had the child ever seen things on the face of her uncle or her mother that had made her wonder things she didn't yet dare to ask about? After all, Martha had been twelve when Jim died. An hour before Emily would have laughed at such an idea. And after all, suppose the child did understand! If she did, she understood nothing dishonorable—nothing a girl nowadays might not meditate upon.
For girls nowadays—well, Bob the other night came into the dining room declaring violently he couldn't sit on the veranda with them. That Ellis girl had been saying—and Johnnie was there, and that beach guard he runs about with—she had said right in front of those men that she had to dramatize some part of the Bible next fall term, and she had chosen the fall of Jericho because of the harlot in it. And Martha had said, "Goodness! You can find a story with more than one harlot in it. Can't she, Johnnie?" And Johnnie had had the decency to say he didn't know. He hadn't been to Sunday school for a long time. Emily had been sure Martha had done it simply to shock Bob. She defended the girls. "I don't care what you say, Bob. It's a lot better than the way I was brought up. It's just a good thing that they talk so frankly with me about such things." And yet—once in a while—she had misgivings—not so much about Martha, of course—who was a good child—but about Eve, for instance, and other girls.