“I had been married eight years when I was your age, Tessa.”
“It will be nine years on my next birthday,” said Tessa.
“Yes, just nine; for I was married on my seventeenth birthday; your father met me one day coming from school and said that he would call that evening; I curled my hair over and put on my garnet merino and waited for him an hour. I expected John Gesner, too. But your father came first and we set the wedding-day that night. I was seventeen and he was thirty-seven!”
“I congratulate you,” said Tessa. “I congratulate the woman who married my father.”
“Girls are so different,” sighed Mrs. Wadsworth. “Now I had two offers that year! Aunt Theresa wanted me to take John Gesner because he was two years younger than your father; but John was only a clerk in the Iron Works then, and so was Lewis. Lewis is just my age. How could I tell that he would make a fortune buying nails?”
“You would have hit the nail on the head if you had known it,” laughed Dinah.
“And here’s Dine, now, she is like me. You are a Wadsworth through and through! Young men like some life about a girl; how many beaux Sue Greyson has! All you think of is education! There was Cliff Manning, you turned the cold shoulder to him because he couldn’t talk grammar. What’s grammar? Grammar won’t make the pot boil.”
“Enough of them would,” suggested Dinah.
“Mr. Towne came and came till he was tired, I suppose. I hope you didn’t refuse him.”
“No, he refused me.”