HOW did they ever get into such a dreadful snarl as this, anyway?
It was Eurie Mitchel who asked this question. She had seated her guests—Flossy Shipley and Marion Wilbur—in the two chairs her small sleeping-room contained, and then curled herself, boarding-school fashion, on the foot of her bed. To be sure it is against the rule, at this present time, for girls in boarding-schools to make sofas of their beds. So I have no doubt it was, when Eurie was a school-girl; nevertheless, she did it.
“Where should I sit?” she asked her mother, one day, when that good lady remonstrated. “On the floor?”
And her mother, looking around the room, and noting the scarcity of chairs, and remembering that there were none to spare from any other portion of the scantily-furnished house, said, “Sure enough!” and laughed off the manifest poverty revealed in the answer, instead of sighing over it. And Eurie went on, making a comfortable seat of her bed, whenever occasion required.
On this particular evening they had been discussing affairs at the Erskine mansion, and Eurie had broken in with her exclamation, and waited for Marion to answer.
“Why,” said Marion, “I know very little about it. There are all sorts of stories in town, just as is always the case; but you needn’t believe any of them; there is not enough truth sprinkled in to save them. Ruth says her father married at a time when he was weak, both in body and mind—just getting up from a long and very serious illness, during which this woman had nursed him with patience and skill, and, the doctors said, saved his life. He discovered, in some way—I don’t know whether she told him so or not, but somehow he made the discovery—that she lost possession of her heart during the process, and that he had gotten it, without any such intention on his part, and, in a fit of gratitude, he married her in haste, and repented at leisure.”
“How perfectly absurd!” said Eurie, in indignation. “The idea that he had no way of showing his gratitude but by standing up with her, and assenting to half a dozen solemn statements, none of which were true, and making promises that he couldn’t keep! I have no patience with that sort of thing.”
“Well, but,” said Flossy, coming in with gentle tone and alleviating words, just as she always did come into the talk of these two. “The woman was a poor, friendless girl then, living a dreadful boarding-house life, entirely dependent on her needle for her daily bread. Think how sorry he must have been for her!”