"Oh, Daddy Geer! O—h—h!"
"Nor Dan Norris? nor none of 'em?"
"Never a one, father."
"Nor don't you ever think of gettin' married and slavin' yourself out for nobody. I'm plenty well able to take care of you, as long as I live. You'll never live so happy as you do at home; and you'll break my heart to go away, Ivy."
"I'll never go, papa." (She pronounced it with the accent on the first syllable.) "Indeed, I never will. I'll never be married, as long as I live."
"No more you sha'n't, good child, good child!"
And again Farmer Geer betook himself to the depths of his arm-chair, with the complacent consciousness of having faithfully discharged his parental duties. "She should not go to school. She would not be married. She had said she would not, and of course she would not."
"Of course I shall not," mused Ivy, as she lay in her white bed. "What could put it into poor papa's head? Marry John Herricks, with his everlasting smirk, and his diddling walk, and take care of all the Herricks' sisters and mothers and aunts, and the Herricks' cows and horses and pigs—and—hens—and—and"——
But Ivy had kept her thoughts on her marriage longer than ever before in her life; and ere she had finished the inventory of John Herricks's personal property and real estate, the blue eyes were closed in the sweet, sound sleep of youth and health.
Mrs. Geer, in her estimate of her daughter's attainments, was partly right and partly wrong. Ivy had never been "finished" at Mrs. Porter's seminary, and was consequently in a highly unfinished condition. "Small Latin and less Greek" jostled each other in her head. German and French, Italian and Spanish, were strange tongues to Ivy. She could not dance, nor play, nor draw, nor paint, nor work little dogs on footstools.