“No; my heart is buried in my husband’s grave. Elsie, dear sister, try to look at these things from a rational point of view. Try to realize that sad as your lot seems at present, there’s happiness ahead, if you choose to accept it. No young girl can so love a man to whom she’s not married as to be inconsolable at his loss.”
“I can,” Elsie persisted, “and I do. And you can talk as long as you like, you’ll never persuade me that I could know a happy moment if I married any one else!”
“Then, dear, don’t you think you ought to sacrifice yourself for mother’s sake? She is so ill,—”
“One word for mother and two for yourself! You don’t fool me, Gerty, not for a minute! You want me to marry because if I don’t we’ll lose Aunt Elizabeth’s money! Why not speak out and say so!”
“Very well, I do, then! And it’s quite as much for your sake as for mine! You don’t know what it will mean to leave this place to live in some little cramped flat, and to work for your living,—unless, indeed, you think of depending on Joe Allison for charity?”
“I don’t,—you know I don’t! But I’d work myself into my grave before I’d marry a man I didn’t love! I can’t even think about it—it makes me so indignant that you can suggest it!”
“That’s the natural feeling, dear, but your case is so different from most girls’. Try to see it clearly. The income of five millions and all the comfort that means, against the sufferings and discomforts that poverty brings. And think not only of yourself, but of mother—”
“Yes! and Gerty; Gerty first, last and all the time!”
“Then, all I have to say is,—you’re a very selfish girl.”
The discussions always wound up like this. Gerty took occasion nearly every day to repeat her accusations of selfishness, to impress on Elsie her duty to her invalid mother; to refer to her own two little children and her own inability to do any work, having the care of them; and eternally did she harp on the fact that since Elsie had not been married to Webb, her grief was merely a temporary regret for a man to whom she had been engaged, which, Gerty held, was an episode that might occur in any girl’s life.