“’Tis neither here nor there what I may have known, or leastways may have guessed,” she said sullenly and with some offence. “Your father never did nothing as the police could have laid hold of—never!”
“Oh, mother!” cried Katherine. “Is that your standard of morality, of virtue?”
The indignation in her voice increased her mother’s annoyance.
“I don’t see, anyhow,” she said very angrily, “that it is the place of a daughter to try and rake up things against her father. William was in a new country, where the morals is new, and maybe he did like his neighbors. But the first people in the old country thought much of him. He’d hev died a lord if he’d lived a year more. The Prince sent a wreath and a gentleman. When he’s laid in his grave with all that pomp and honor, what for do you, his own child, go and try to throw mud on his coffin? I think it shame of you, Kathleen; and if that’s all your fine eddication has taught you, well ’twas money ill spent, and you’d better look at the fifth commandment.”
With a sigh her daughter rose and walked through the veranda into the gardens beyond, and thence into the pine-woods. She felt the utter impossibility of ever bringing her mother’s mind into any unison with her own. It was wholly useless to attempt to reach and touch a chord which did not exist. If she pursued the course which she thought right, she must do so in spite of her mother, and alone in her choice.
Margaret Massarene loved her daughter, but she thought Katherine was a “crank.” She could see no reason why they should not both of them enjoy the good things poor William had left behind him.
She was a good and honest woman; but in Kerosene City the moral feelings lose their sensitiveness, and she could not follow Katherine’s reasonings; she considered them high-flown, and a pack of nonsense. “As for fortunes being made honest,” said Margaret Massarene to herself, “’tis a pack of stuff to dream of it. You can’t no more make a big fortune with clean hands than you can stack a dung heap.”
But when the fortune, however accumulated, was made, it seemed to her flying in the face of an all-seeing Providence to quarrel with it, and to “climb down.” Whoever did climb down if they could help it?
“You would not like to visit America, mother?” Katherine said to her a few days later.
Margaret Massarene gasped.