“Morbid again,” said Moya. “You belong to your own day and generation. You might as well wear country shoes and clothes because your father wore them.”
“Still, if we have such a thing in this country as class, then you and I do not belong to the same class except by virtue of Uncle Jacob's money. Confess you are glad I am a Bevier and a Broderick and a Van Elten, as well as a Bogardus.”
“I shall confess nothing of the kind. Now you do talk like a nouveau Paul, dear,” said Moya, with her caressing eyes on his—they had paused under the lamp at the top of the steps—“I think your father must have been a very good man.”
“All our fathers were,” Paul averred, smiling at her earnestness.
“Yes, but yours in particular; because you are an angel; and your mother is quite human, is she not?—almost as human as I am? That carriage of the head,—if that does not mean the world!”—
“She has needed all her pride.”
“I don't object to pride, myself,” said the girl, “but you dwell so upon her humiliations. I see no such record in her face.”
“She has had much to hide, you must remember.”
“Well, she can hide things; but one's self must escape sometimes. What has become of little Emily Van Elten who ran away with her father's hired man? What has become of the freighter's wife?”
“She is all mother now. She brought us back to the world, and for our sakes she has learned to take her place in it. Herself she has buried.”