“Because,” said Mrs. Buchanan in the same rapid tone, “it would just be better than ever now. He will have a very good estate, and he’s a very nice callant—kind and true, and not so silly as you might expect from his upbringing. If that was your thought, Elsie, it would be far wiser than I ever gave you credit for—and your father and me, we would never have a word but good and blessing to say——”
“Oh, mother,” cried Elsie, “you to say the like of that to me—because a person was to have a good estate!”
“And wherefore no? A good estate is a very good thing: and plenty of siller, if it is not the salt of life—oh, my dear, many a time it gives savour to the dish. Wersh, wersh without it is often the household bread.”
“It is not me,” cried Elsie, flinging high her head, “that would ever take a man for his siller: I would rather have no bread at all. Just a mouthful of cake,[A] and my freedom to myself.”
[A] It may here be explained for the benefit of the Souther that cake in the phraseology of old Scotland meant oat cake, in distinction from the greater luxury of “loaf-bread:” so that the little princess who suggested that the poor people who had no bread might eat cake, might have been a reasonable and wise Scot, instead of the silly little person we have all taken her to be.
“I said there were whimsies in the lassie’s head,” said Mrs. Buchanan, “it’s the new-fangled thing I hear that they are setting up themselves against their natural lot. And what would you do with your freedom if you had it, I would like to know? Freedom, quotha! and she a lassie, and little over twenty. If you were not all fools at that age!”
“I was meaning just my freedom—to bide at home, and make no change,” said Elsie, a little abashed.
“’Deed there are plenty,” said Mrs. Buchanan, “that get that without praying for’t. There are your aunties, two of them, Alison and Kirsteen—the old Miss Buchanans, very respectable, well-living women. Would you like to be like them? And Lizzie Aitken, she has let pass her prime, and the Miss Wemysses that are settling down in their father’s old house, just very respectable. If that is what you would like, Elsie, you will maybe get it, and that without any force on Providence. They say there are always more women than men in every country-side.”
Elsie felt herself insulted by these ironical suggestions. She made no answer, but went on at her work with a flying needle, as if it were a matter of life and death.
“But if that’s not to your mind,” Mrs. Buchanan added, “I would not take a scorn at Frank. There is nothing to object to in him. If there was anything to make up to him for, I would say again—make it up to him, Elsie: but being just very well off as he is, there is another way of looking at it. I never saw you object to him dangling after you when nothing was meant. But in serious earnest he well just be a very good match, and I would be easy in my mind about your future, if I saw you——”