“And you, missy? Girls have professions nowadays as well as their brothers. Have you any special vocation in view?”
Jill shook her pretty shaggy head.
“Oh no, I’m just going to be a plain lady!” whereat the General threw himself back in his chair with a stentorian laugh.
“No, that you never will! That is, fortunately, out of your own hands. You will have to make another choice, my dear.”
Jill showed her white teeth in a smile, wholly unembarrassed by the compliment.
“I mean, I shall get married as soon as I leave school. I should hate to have to make money for myself. I’ll marry a rich man with lots of dogs and horses, and then I can enjoy myself without any bother.”
The General drew his eyebrows together and stared scrutinisingly at the girlish figure seated on the high-backed oak chair. Flowing locks, short petticoats, heavy boots, woollen gloves—just a bit of a schoolgirl in the hobbledehoy stage in which feminine instincts seem dormant—and the ambitions are more those of a boy than a girl. But Jill was going to be a woman some day, and a fascinating woman into the bargain, with all the power for good or evil over the lives of others which such fascination brings. The General shook his head in warning fashion.
“Don’t say that, my girl. Never say or think a thing like that again! You are only a child, but you’ll grow up. It’s wonderful how quickly you young things spring up. You’ll be a woman before you can say, ‘Jack Robinson!’ and there’s no worse sin a woman can commit than to look upon marriage as a mere profession, an easy way of securing board and lodging. It’s not only ruining her own life—it’s ten times worse—for it ruins another into the bargain. When I was a young fellow I asked a girl to marry me—the only girl I ever did ask—and she wouldn’t look at me. She was a poor girl, and I had lots of money, but she was honest with me all the same, and I’ve been grateful to her all my life. I’ve been a lonely old fellow, but it would have been a thousand times worse to have had a wife who did not love me! You put it out of your head, little girl, that you are going to sell yourself for all the horses and dogs in creation.”
“Um—” said Jill vaguely.
She had scented a love—story, and with the inherent curiosity of her sex was dying to hear more about it.