“Our girls have been carefully educated,” said Mrs. Hiller, a little hurt at the turn the dialogue had taken. “In this country a thorough education is a fortune. They could set up a school.”
“To compete with a thousand others conducted by those who have been trained expressly for this profession; whom constant practice has made au fait to the ever-changing modes of instruction and fashionable text-books. Why, I, whose Latin salutatory was praised as a model of classic composition, and who read Horace, Sallust, and Livy in the original almost every day, cannot understand more than half the quotations spouted in the court-house and at lawyers’ dinners, by youngsters who have learned the ‘continental method’ of pronunciation. I cannot even parse English, for the very parts of speech are disguised under new names. A noun-substantive is something else, an article is a pronoun, and, what with adjuncts, subjects, and modifiers, I stand abashed in the presence of a ten-year-old in the primary department of a public school. Our girls might go out as daily governesses at a dollar a day, or run their chances of getting music scholars away from professionals by offering lessons at half price. They are good, intelligent, and industrious. I don’t deny their ability to make a bare living, if forced to do it. I don’t believe they could do more. When the rainy day comes, He who tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, must be their helper. Let us hope that day will never dawn. And by way of additional provision against it, I must leave you for an hour or two, to keep an engagement with a client. Don’t let the memory of our talk depress you. We won’t cross the bridge before we come to it. Here is ‘Old Kensington’ to amuse you. You know, darling, that I would work brains and fingers to nothing rather than have you and the lassies want for so much as the ‘latest thing’ in neck ribbons. And so would any man who is worthy of the name.”
“I know you would.”
The elderly love-couple gazed into each other’s eyes, exchanged a good-bye kiss as fondly as at their partings twenty-three years before.
“I could ask no fairer destiny for my daughters than has been mine,” murmured the mother, resettling herself in her luxurious chair before the sea-coal fire, and putting out her hand for the book the thoughtful kindness of her husband had provided for her evening’s entertainment. “But to every prize, there are so many blanks! It is worse for a woman to sell herself for a home and a livelihood than for her to fight, hand-to-hand with poverty, all her life. If girls would only believe this. I mean that mine shall!”
She did not open the book yet. Unrest and dissatisfaction were in the face that studied the seething, glowing pile in the grate.
“There are the Payne girls, for instance!” she said, presently, with increasing discomfort.
The book lay, still shut, in her lap. She folded her hands upon it; lay back in the chair, and did not move again in an hour. She was “thinking it out;” pulling: hard on the oar in the teeth of head-wind and fog.
She was haunted by the Payne girls. Their father, a popular physician, had lived handsomely; worked hard; been exemplary in his home, his profession, in church, and in city. He sent his five daughters to the best schools, and fitted them by culture and dress to make a creditable appearance in the world—the only world they cared for—a round of visits, parties and show-places for marriageable young people of both sexes. They were nice girls, said complaisant Everybody. Not beautiful, or gifted, but sprightly, well-bred and amiable—the very material out of which to make good wives and mothers. Two did marry before the sad day on which their father was brought home in an apoplectic fit, from which he never rallied. They married for love, but not imprudently. Their husbands were merchants with fair prospects, steady, enterprising, moral young men, who were yet not quite disposed to be burdened with the care of a maiden sister-in-law-and-a-half apiece in addition to the support of their families proper. That somebody would have to “look after the unmarried daughters” was soon bruited about. There were two boys—five and ten years old—to be educated; the widow to be provided for, and, when the estate was settled up, nothing except a life-insurance of eighteen thousand dollars was left with which to compass all this. Tenderhearted Everybody was sorry for the fatherless boys; sorrier for the widow, who had loved her husband very truly; sorriest for “the Payne girls.” Before their mourning was rusty, appreciative Everybody began to nudge Everybody Else slyly, when in company with the Payne girls, to call attention to the fact, daily more and more palpable, that the sisters three were anxious to get married. Not more anxious, if the secrets of feminine hearts had been revealed, than were dozens of others in their set, but they had not the art to dissemble their eagerness. Nobody stayed his, or her laugh at them by considering that, since they had deliberately, conscientiously, and humanely determined to relieve their mother from the crushing weight of their dependence, and saw no other way of doing this than by selling themselves in the licensed and respectable shambles of matrimony, they should have been commended for doing with all their might whatsoever their hands found to do. They angled earnestly, but with a zeal so little according to knowledge that the most bull-headed gudgeon in the preserved waters of bachelor and widowerdom scorned to be imposed upon by the bait. They borrowed the finery of their better-off sisters; made their own and their mother’s over and over again; went every where and tried every phase of fascination, “from grave to gay, from lively to severe,” until their eager, ceaseless smiles wore wrinkles about lips and eyes that ill-natured Everybody called crows-feet, and the tales of their fawnings, toadyisms, and manœuvres were stale in the ears of greedy Everybody—yet were still, at thirty-six, thirty-eight, and forty years of age, the Payne girls, “whose brothers were now able to do something for them.” What more suitable than that these fine young fellows—one of whom had chosen his father’s profession, while the other had gone into partnership with his brother-in-law, should bind pillions upon their backs whereon their sisters could ride in reputable indolence, behind the wives they had wedded and had a right to cherish?
“It was a pity,” considerate Everybody now began to whisper, “that they should be thus hampered; but what else could be done?”