“You could immediately retire into a convent.”
Dinah had mischievously fallen behind with her father and mother.
“Then I could never find my good man?”
“Must you find him or die forlorn?”
For several moments she found no answer: then the words came deliberately; “Perhaps I need not; I wonder why I thought there was a must in the matter; why may I not be happy and helpful without ending as good little girls do in fairy stories? I need not live or die forlorn—and yet—Gus, you are the only person in the whole world to whom I would confess that I would rather be like the good little girl in the fairy story! Please forget it.”
“It is too pleasant to forget,” he answered. “I do not want you to be too ambitious or too wise for the good old fashions of wife and mother!”
“How can any woman be that!” she exclaimed indignantly.
“May you never know.”
“What an easy time Eve had! All she had to do was to be led to Adam. She would not have chosen him a while afterward; he was altogether too much under her influence.”
“That weakness has become a part of our original sin.”