Katherine smiled.
“Do not let that vex you. I will live with you, and you will give me twenty pounds a year for my clothes, and it will be wholesome discipline for me, and I shall be able to have a new gown once a year, which ought to be quite enough.”
“Oh, Katherine, how can you jest?” said her mother, with fresh tears; for, though the great world had laughed at her, worried her, tortured her, robbed her, harassed her, she had been pleased and proud to be in it, and now she was to “climb down,” and be nobody in particular, and have a penniless daughter who talked of dressing on twenty pounds a year and who would never marry!
“We will be very happy together, mother,” said Katherine with a caressing tenderness of tone, rare in her, as she took her mother’s hand, which was resting on the eider-down coverlet of the bed. “I may have done this thing too quickly and not wisely, but I breathe freely and am content.”
Margaret Massarene sighed.
“My dear, you won’t be happy. You’ll repent. ’Tis a pity you weren’t made like the Duchess of Otterbourne. She wouldn’t have quarrelled with your father’s pile.”
“Certainly she would not,” said Katherine bitterly, “and I am sorry you wish me like her, mother.”
Margaret Massarene reflected a moment, drying her tears.
“My dear, ’twould be better for you. People only call you odd and queer. You see, Kathleen,” she added with that shrewdness which early life had taught her, “in what you’ve done, you’ve as good as said to all other people that they’re knaves: it’s very bad to be thought above one’s generation, my dear. Jesus cleared the Temple with a scourge; but they paid him out for it, my dear—they paid him out for it on Calvary.”
The excitement which had sustained her throughout her arduous and self-imposed task had subsided and left, as all spent forces do, a sense of lassitude and weariness behind them. A fatigued impression of failure and of loneliness was on her.