Cornelia stared at her blankly for a moment, and valiantly forced a smile.
“I guess there’s two sides to it, as there are to most things in this world. My Poppar’ll think it splendid, but you’ll hate it badly enough. I’m going pretty quick, Mury! You won’t have me but four days more!”
The truth was out. She had burned her boats, and made retreat impossible. While Mary wept and lamented, Cornelia wrote the confirmatory wire, and sent it out to the waiting messenger. Then Mary returned to continue her lamentations.
“I wish I could marry him, and be done with it! I can’t seem to face staying on here with no one but her in the house, nagging at us all the day. I’ll have to make another move!” she proclaimed dismally. In Mary’s converse the singular pronoun, when masculine, always applied to her friend; when feminine, to her mistress. Cornelia had grasped this fact, and had therefore no difficulty in understanding her meaning. She sat down in a chair by the window, and stared at the maid with serious eyes.
“Do you love him, Mury? Enough to marry him, and live beside him every one day to the end of your life? You think you would not get—tired?”
Mary hesitated, unwilling to commit herself. “I wouldn’t like to go so far as that,” she announced judicially. “He aggravates me at times something cruel, but I’d sooner be aggravated by him nor anyone else. They talk a lot of rubbish about love, Miss Cornelia, but that’s about the size of it when all’s said and done. Some people suit you and others don’t, and all the lovey-doveying in the world won’t make ’em—”
“Why, Mury, you are a philosopher! It’s the dead truth, Mury, but I guess you needn’t rub it in.—If you’ve made up your mind, why need you wait?”
“Furniture, miss! I’ve told him I won’t marry to go into rooms, not if it’s ever so. I’ll wait till I get a ’ome of me own. He’d put by a goodish bit, and so had I, but things have been agen us. He was out of work four months last winter, and mother’s legs are a awful drain—liniments, and bandages, and what-not. You can’t see your own mother suffer, and not pay out. We’ve got to wait till we save up again.”
“How much money does it take to furnish a cottage over here, Mury?”
“That depends on how it’s done. You can do it ’an’some for forty pounds. I lived with a girl who did hers for twenty, but I wouldn’t like to be as close as that. I reckon about thirty.”