“Do you resist such a sweet mothering as that?” rebuked Mrs. Lane. “I think I lost some of the sermon Sunday morning by looking at her face.”
“I do not mean to resist her,” said Judith, not able to keep the tears back.
“She told mother her heart ached to have you back,” persuaded Jean, “since her sister died she had so longed for her little girl.”
“I’m afraid I am not doing right,” confessed Judith, “but I was almost homesick there, when Aunt Rody was sick. And then, I think I must learn to support myself, and not be dependent.”
“Oh, you American girl,” said Mrs. Lane.
“And with Aunt Affy for your mother,” added Jean; “I told Mrs. Lane you had ideas.”
“I should think I had,” said Judith, laughing to keep the tears back. “I’m afraid I’ve forgotten Aunt Affy. She loves two people in me, she says; my mother and me. I don’t know what has possessed me.”
“Ambition, perhaps,” Mrs. Lane suggested, taking up her knitting,—a long black stocking for her only grandchild.
“Not just that,” Judith reasoned; “it is more making something of myself for myself. Culture for its own sake,” she quoted from Roger, who had warned her against her devotion to self-culture; “and I give it a self-sacrificing name; the desire to be independent. I do not know why I should not be dependent on Aunt Affy. My mother was—and loved it.”
“No service could be more acceptable than serving her,” said Mrs. Lane; “the world is only a larger Bensalem.”