She resumed more seriously. “Something papa heard last night caused us to lay this subject especially to heart. Doctor Jaynes says there is no doubt that Mr. Sibthorpe is threatened with softening of the brain. He has been doing extra work this winter—bookkeeping and copying in the evenings, at home, as he could pick up such jobs, to eke out his salary, and it has been too much for him. Nothing but absolute rest and freedom from care can save him. Doctor Jaynes told him so plainly, and he answered, with tears, that it was out of the question—he must die in harness. It was natural that the news should interest and sadden us.”
“He has a very helpless family,” remarked Emma, compassionately.
“Because so many of them—all who are grown up—are girls!” cried Blanche, impetuously. “That tells the whole story. And such a pitiful, disgraceful, humiliating one it is! I could be ashamed of being a woman. Mrs. Sibthorpe—indeed a majority of American mothers of the genteeler sort, ought to turn pagans, and drown their baby-girls as soon as they are born. That would be better than turning them loose—great, overgrown babies, forever whining, with their fingers in their mouths, over their feebleness, and timidity, and sentimental ignorance—upon a grinning, or groaning public!”
“But how strange that we have never taken this subject into serious consideration before,” said sensible Emma. “That other people do not, is certain. Mother, you won’t mind if I ask you a question or two?”
“My precious child! as many as you like. I wish you to state every objection frankly. You are of age, you know. I could not compel you to adopt my suggestion, if I were disposed to do so. Nor will I coerce the judgment of one of you three. We must go into this enterprise heartily and all together, or not at all.”
“Will not our action excite much talk when it is known, give rise to unpleasant surmises, and subject us to many impertinent inquiries?”
“Undoubtedly it will. We may as well prepare ourselves for this. And the same kind guardians of their neighbors’ behavior and general interests would buzz and sting yet more industriously were one of us to sicken with small-pox, or the house to burn down to-morrow. Or, if papa were to go off in a rapid consumption, they would bewail the number of girls in our family as loudly and as delightedly as they will soon be gossiping about poor, distraught Mr. Sibthorpe, and his quartette of what Blanche calls overgrown babies; would dole out to us such charity of word and deed as falls to the share of the Payne girls. My darlings, if I could tell you how I long to see you independent of such changes in fortune and fair-weather friends! each of you armed in herself to meet reverses and to defy them, with God’s help and blessing upon those who are trying to help themselves!”
Whatever error the tender mother may have made in her calculations of what was to be risked, gained, and lost by the bold step she purposed, she had not overrated the amount and quality of gossip caused by the practical operation of her scheme. Stories, having “Mrs. Hiller’s queer whim” for a starting-point, increased and multiplied, and flew over the town like thistle-down in a windy September day. The mother was a tyrant; the daughters were peculiar and strong-minded. The parents refused to maintain their offspring because they were not sons, and had informed them of their intention to bequeath every dollar of their property to a Boys’ Orphan Asylum. The offspring disdained to be fed and clothed by the hated parents. Mr. Hiller was insolvent; Mrs. Hiller was insane; both were misers. The sisters were engaged to be married to missionaries, and were bent upon engrafting the multifarious iniquities of the modern and Christian woman’s garb upon the scantily-clothed trunk of Ashantee, or Papuyan, or Root-digger fashions.
At first our heroines were annoyed, then diverted. In less than three months they ceased to think of the babble at all, in their growing interest in their active, varied home-life.
Just a year from the March night on which Mrs. Hiller had used so many nautical figures in her speech and reverie, two cards were brought up to the “academy of useful arts,” as the fair students therein persisted in calling a large room at the back of the house. It was airy and sunny, and, to-day, was full of life and enjoyment, for mother and daughters were gathered there, and the chirping was like that of a happily-crowded robin’s nest.