Another thing that influenced impressible Tessa this day, was a talk at the tea-table. They were sitting around the tea-table cozily, the four people who, in her mother’s thought, constituted all Tessa’s world. Mr. Wadsworth in an easy position in his arm-chair was listening to his three girls and deciding that his little wife was really the handsomest and sprightliest woman that he had ever seen, that happy little Dine was as bewitching as she could well be, and that Tessa, the light of his eyes, was like no one else in all the world. Not that any stranger sitting in his arm-chair would have looked through his eyes, but he was an old man, disappointed in his life, and his three girls were all of earth and a part of heaven to him. They were all talking and he was satisfied to listen. “I believe that some girls are born without a mother’s heart,” Mrs. Wadsworth said in reply to a story of Dine’s about a young mother in Dunellen who had slapped her baby, saying that she hated it and was nothing but a slave to it! “Now, here’s Tessa. She has no motherliness. Only this morning Freddie Stone fell down near the gate and hurt his head; his screams were terrifying, but she went on working and let him scream. As I said it is all as girls are born.”
“Yes,” answered Tessa, in the deliberate way in which she had schooled herself to reply to her mother, “I know that your last assertion is true. There was a lady in school, a teacher of mathematics, she acknowledged that she did not love her own little girls as other mothers seemed to do. She stated it as she would have stated any fact in geometry; perhaps she thought that she was no more responsible for one than for the other. The mere fact of motherhood does not bring mother love within; any mother that does not give to her child a true idea of the mother-heart of God fails utterly in being a mother. She may be a nurse, a paid nurse, or a nurse upon compulsion; any hired nurse can wash a child’s face, can tie its sash and make pretty things for it to wear, and any nurse, who was never mother to a child, can teach it what God means when He says, ‘as a mother comforteth.’ Miss Jewett could not be happier in her Bible class girls if they were all her own children; she says so herself. Mary Sherwood said to her one day, ‘If my mother were like you, how different I should have been!’”
“Such a case is an exception,” returned Mrs. Wadsworth excitedly.
“Nineteen out of her twenty-three girls tell her their troubles when they would not tell their own mothers,” said Dinah. “She has twenty-three secret drawers to keep their secrets in.”
“She has time to listen to fol-de-rol. She advises them all to marry for some silly notion and let a good home slip, I’ve no doubt.”
“I expect that twenty-one of her girls have refused John Gesner,” laughed Mr. Wadsworth. “He will have to bribe Miss Jewett to let them alone.”
“Only twenty, father,” said Dine. “Tessa and Sue and I are waiting to do it.”
“I will make this house too uncomfortable for the one of you that does refuse him.”
“Mother! mother!” remonstrated Mr. Wadsworth gently.
“He’ll never have the honor,” said Dine. “Mr. Lewis Gesner is the gentleman; I have always admired him. Haven’t you, Tessa?”