Mr. Fullerton, with a rose-bud in his button-hole, went off with the boys for a farming walk. Mrs. Fullerton returned to the house, and the sisters were left pacing together in the sheltered old garden, between two rows of gorgeous autumn flowers.
Hadria felt sick with dread of the coming interview.
Algitha was buoyed up, for the moment, by a strong conviction that she was in the right.
“It can’t be fair even for parents to order one’s whole life according to their pleasure,” she said. “Other girls submit, I know——”
“And so the world is full of abortive, ambiguous beings, fit for nothing. The average woman always seem to me to be muffled——or morbid.”
“That’s what I should become if I pottered about here much longer,” said Algitha—“morbid; and if there is one thing on the face of the earth that I loathe, it is morbidness.”
Both sisters were instinctively trying to buttress up Algitha’s courage, by strengthening her position with additional arguments.
“Is it fair,” Hadria asked, “to summon children into the world, and then run up bills against them for future payment? Why should one not see the bearings of the matter?”
“In theory one can see them clearly enough; but it is poor comfort when it comes to practice.”
“Oh, seeing the bearings of things is always poor comfort!” exclaimed the younger sister, with sudden vehemence. “Upon my word, I think it is better, after all, to absorb indiscriminately whatever idiotcy may happen to be around one, and go with the crowd.”