“My dear, he has never been unkind to you. I am certain that you never can say that of him. Major Hockin unkind to a poor girl like you!”
“The last thing I wish to claim is any body's pity,” I answered, less humbly than I should have spoken, though the pride was only in my tone, perhaps. “If people choose to pity me, they are very good, and I am not at all offended, because—because they can not help it, perhaps, from not knowing any thing about me. I have nothing whatever to be pitied for, except that I have lost my father, and have nobody left to care for me, except Uncle Sam in America.”
“Your Uncle Sam, as you call him, seems to be a very wonderful man, Erema,” said Mrs. Hockin, craftily, so far as there could be any craft in her; “I never saw him—a great loss on my part. But the Major went up to meet him somewhere, and came home with the stock of his best tie broken, and two buttons gone from his waistcoat. Does Uncle Sam make people laugh so much? or is it that he has some extraordinary gift of inducing people to taste whiskey? My husband is a very—most abstemious man, as you must be well aware, Miss Wood, or we never should have been as we are, I am sure. But, for the first time in all my life, I doubted his discretion on the following day, when he had—what shall I say?—when he had been exchanging sentiments with Uncle Sam.”
“Uncle Sam never takes too much in any way,” I replied to this new attack; “he knows what he ought to take, and then he stops. Do you think that it may have been his 'sentiments,' perhaps, that were too strong and large for the Major?”
“Erema!” cried Mrs. Hockin, with amazement, as if I had no right to think or express my thoughts on life so early; “if you can talk politics at eighteen, you are quite fit to go any where. I have heard a great deal of American ladies, and seen not a little of them, as you know. But I thought that you called yourself an English girl, and insisted particularly upon it.”
“Yes, that I do; and I have good reason. I am born of an old English family, and I hope to be no disgrace to it. But being brought up in a number of ways, as I have been without thinking of it, and being quite different from the fashionable girls Major Hockin likes to walk with—”
“My dear, he never walks with any body but myself!”
“Oh yes, I remember! I was thinking of the deck. There are no fashionable girls here yet. Till the terrace is built, and the esplanade—”
“There shall be neither terrace nor esplanade if the Major is to do such things upon them.”
“I am sure that he never would,” I replied; “it was only their dresses that he liked at all, and that very, to my mind, extraordinary style, as well as unbecoming. You know what I mean, Mrs. Hockin, that wonderful—what shall I call it?—way of looping up.”