"You appear to think it a grand thing to have been able to get yourself married, Mrs Denwiddie, and you seem disposed to look down on every young woman who is still single; but you don't tell what kind of man you got, and you forget that if everybody was willing to take what offered, there would be no single folks left. We may have been too particular, we single women, but the married ones have no call to despise us for that."
"No offence, my dear," said Mrs Denwiddie, who really could not afford to quarrel with her chief intimate. "I was just speaking in the gineral."
"And so was I, ma'am; and don't you forget it. I'm going home on Friday, and as there's few you are likely to pick up with much when I'm gone, except the single ladies, I would strongly recommend you to respect their feelin's, and not brag too much about havin' been married. They could have been married too, if they'd have took what offered--like some others."
"Hoity-toity, my dear! I said 'no offence.' But you're all that tetchy, you old--hm--but never mind. I'm sorry you're going. I for one will miss you. I did not think the schools at Montpelier took up so soon. I expected that you and me would have been leaving at the same time, in about three weeks."
"I have arrangements to make at our ladies' college. They are adding a class of Metaphysics and Political Economy, and Miss Rolph, our principal, says I would get it if I wasn't so young."
"And well you would teach economy too, my dear, to judge by the neat way your gloves and slippers is mended. And it's a thing girls have much need to learn, if only there was some one who knew it; but the mothers of town-bred girls are ez extravagant mostly ez themselves. But how old must a woman be before she is qualified to teach economy? Strikes me, if they don't know it when they're young, they'll never know it."
"This is metaphysics and political economy. That means running the State, not household management. Miss Rolph's establishment is devoted to the higher culture. We leave the affairs of common life to elementary schools. Miss Rolph says a woman should be forty and a formed character before she ventures to instil these grand subjects into the American woman of the future. I won't be thirty till my next birthday."
"You don't mean that, my dear? You'll be a married woman, I hope, before you're old enough to go lecterin' about physic, on them terms. And I don't hold with women-doctors, let me tell you. They hain't got strength in their arms to pull out a good-sized tooth; and as for intelleck, I can't abide a woman of intelleck. But you're different, my dear, and you're young yet--in a way; and you do yourself injestice, let me tell you. What makes you dress so severe? A veil would save your eyes as good as them blue glasses you wear out of doors, and be a sight more becomin'. You can't expect to fetch a young man with a look that comes filterin' to him through coloured glass. And I'd put on more style, if I was as young as you, my dear, and buy me a new jupong out of Bosting. There's nothing like stylish clothes, my dear, when you're young; and you'll never be younger."
Maida felt positively grateful and soothed at the old woman's prattle. It takes so very small a crumb of personal interest to cheer and warm the hearts of lonely ones. The schoolma'am was by herself in the world, earning her own living, and battling her solitary way in life. Those among whom she lived employed her at what she could do, paid her, and that was the end of it. They had their own concerns and interests. When Maida's work was done, they let her go her way,--a drop in the river, a unit in the crowd, into whose life they were not called on to intrude, and who would have shrunk from pushing herself into theirs. She could have kissed Mrs Denwiddie, had the situation been more favourable; as it was, she drew closer to her in their walk upon the sands, rubbing against her dumbly, as the animals do when they find a friend, and felt warmed in doing it.
Mrs Denwiddie understood, and a motherly instinct awoke within her, which was new and pleasant--a fresh interest in the monotony of a life in which the bells for meals had been the only landmark.