"How can she help herself?" cries Esther's champion, indignantly. "What sort of work are those little weak hands, that little inexperienced head, fitted for?"
"Women with hands as weak and heads as inexperienced have toiled for their daily bread before now, I suppose," rejoins Mrs. Brandon, with a certain hardness, foreign to her nature, and arising from that spirit of contradiction, innate in us all, which makes us look coldly upon any object that some one else is making a fuss over.
Bob springs to his feet in great wrath, and speaks low and quick: "Mother! I'm sorry I ever broached this subject to you; one takes a long time, I see, to get acquainted with one's nearest relatives' characters. If you can see the child of one of your oldest friends working her poor little fingers to the bone for the bare necessaries of life without stretching out a finger to help her, I cannot!"
Speaking thus disrespectfully, he walks towards the door.
"A spaniel, a woman, and a walnut tree,
The more you beat 'em, the better they be."
says the rude old saw. Every woman, from a mother to a mistress, enjoys, rather than otherwise, being bullied.
The old woman half rises, and stretching out her hand to her son, says, "My boy! come back! let us talk rationally: don't quarrel with your old mother about a person that will never be so good a friend to you as she is."
He turns, half hesitating: anger's red ensign still aflame on his honest face.
"Shall I tell you, Bob, why I cannot feel common compassion for—for this girl?"
"Why?"