"One would not like a girl to display her feelings too openly before marriage. You would call it boldness."
"Has she any feeling to display? Can we expect her to have that kind of feeling for a man who might be her father?"
"My dear Susan, time will show. I bring love to the union enough for both, and it will be strange if I do not make her happy. If you knew the story of my youth--which you do not, and it is not needful that you should--but you have known my later life; how I have been alone while others have been making themselves tender ties and households. Do you think it can be anything but dreary to feel that you have no one to call your own--that you can shelter your whole family under your hat-brim?"
"What of your nieces? What of poor Caleb's children?"
"You know I am fond of them, Susan. I do not think you will accuse me of being a neglectful uncle or brother-in-law."
"And yet you are going to cast us off, and put this stranger in our places."
"Not in your places. Why should it make any difference between us? The girls like her."
"That only shows their innocence and ignorance of the world, poor things."
"I do not see it, Susan. If it is their prospects you mean, they are independent already; but you may rest assured they will both come in for a slice, when my belongings come to be divided."
"There! It only wanted that!" cried the sister-in-law, seizing the opportunity to let off steam in a burst of indignation. "It only wanted insult to heap upon the injury. You must fling your testamentary intentions in my teeth, as if I were a mercenary person, in case I should not feel crushed and humbled sufficiently under your latest whim! Have I failed to keep up the family respectability and position as I should? I am growing too old, I suppose, to be the Mrs Naylor of Jones's Landing. Somebody younger must be found to lord it over the people, and turn their heads with follies and expensive notions they cannot afford; and I am to be the neglected dowager living in retirement with my fatherless girls.... But she shall never have it all her own way, Joseph Naylor, if I can help it; and if she has, it will be still worse for you!" And so saying, Susan got up and flung out of the room, retiring to her chamber, where a full hour elapsed before her heat subsided, and she was able to see how foolish and unreasonable, not to say imprudent, she had been.