“I don’t know what you mean. My girls are not different from other girls. What would your poor father say if he were alive? It is cruel to say this to me, when I stinted myself to give you every possible advantage, and I paid Miss Martin eighty pounds a year,” she concluded, tearfully, feeling as though she were the victim of a fraud.
She was far more easily convinced that going out as companions would be impracticable under the circumstances. “Oh, no, that will never do!” she cried, when the two little rooms with Dulce were proposed; and after this Phillis found her task less difficult. She talked her mother over at last to reluctant acquiescence. “I never knew how I came to consent,” she said, afterwards, “but they were too much for me.”
“We cannot starve. I suppose I must give in to you,” she said, at last; “but I shall never hold up my head again.” And she really believed what she said.
“Mother, you must trust us,” replied Phillis, touched by this victory she had won. “Do you know what I said to Dulce? Work cannot degrade us. Though we are dressmakers, we are still Challoners. Nothing can make us lose our dignity and self-respect as gentlewomen.”
“Other people will not recognize it,” returned her mother, with a sigh. “You will lose caste. No one will visit you. Among your equals you will be treated as inferiors. It is this that bows me to the earth with shame.”
“Mother, how can you talk so?” cried Nan, in a clear, indignant voice. “What does it matter if people do not visit us? We must have a world of our own, and be sufficient for ourselves, if we can only keep together. Is not that what you have said to us over and over again? Well, we shall be together, we shall have each other. What does the outside world matter to us after all?”
“Oh, you are young; you do not know what complications may arise,” replied Mrs. Challoner, with the gloomy forethought 82 of middle age. She thought she knew the world better than they, but in reality she was almost as guileless and ignorant as her daughters. “Until you begin, you do not know the difficulties that will beset you,” she went on.
But notwithstanding this foreboding speech, she was some what comforted by Nan’s words: “they would be together!” Well, if Providence chose to inflict this humiliation and afflictive dispensation on her, it could be borne as long as she had her children around her.
Nan made one more speech,—a somewhat stern one for her.
“Our trouble will be a furnace to try our friends. We shall know the true from the false. Only those who are really worth the name will be faithful to us.”