"Dolly, Dolly, money is a good thing."
"There is not enough of it in the world to buy me, mother. Don't try to fix my price."
The rest of that day Dolly was gay. Whether from the reaction of spirits natural to seventeen, or whether she were lightened in heart by the explicitness of her talk with her mother in the morning, she was the life of the day's journey. The road itself mended; the landscape was often noble, with fine oak and beech woods, and lovely in its rich cultivation; meadows and ploughed fields and tracts of young grain and smiling villages alternating with one another. There was no tedium in the carriage from morning to night. St. Leger and Rupert laughed at Dolly, and with her; and Mrs. Copley, in spite of chewing the cud of mortification at Dolly's impracticableness, was beguiled into forgetting herself. Sometimes this happy effect could be managed; at other times it was impossible. But more days followed, not so gay.
"I'm as tired as I can be!" was Mrs. Copley's declaration, as they were approaching Leipzig.
"We'll soon get to our hotel now," said Lawrence soothingly.
"'Tain't that," said Mrs. Copley; "I am tired of hotels too. I am tired of going from one place to another. I should like to stay still somewhere."
"But it is doing you good, mother."
"I don't see it," said Mrs. Copley. "And what do you mean by its doing me good, Dolly? What is good that you don't feel? It's like something handsome that you can't see; and if you call that good, I don't. I wonder if life's to everybody what it is to me!"
"Not exactly," said Lawrence. "Not everybody can go where he likes and do what he will, and have such an attendant handmaiden everywhere."
"Do what I will!" cried Mrs. Copley, who like other dissatisfied people did not like to have her case proved against her,—"much you know about it, Mr. St. Leger! If I had my will, I would go back to America."