Mrs. Yorke looked displeased. “I wish for a frank answer,” she said. “What is the meaning of this? It isn’t possible that there has been any trifling on your part!”
The girl blushed deeply, but told what little there was to tell, including that unlucky question: “How would you like to be a sailor’s wife?”
“He hadn’t the slightest personal meaning, mamma,” Clara added hastily, seeing her eyes open with something like a flash. “He told Edith afterward that it was a slip of the tongue.”
“Then why should not that have been the end of the matter?” Mrs. Yorke asked, rather peremptorily. “You had but to assume that such a thing was impossible, not to be thought of, and be just as courteous to him as before.”
“But you see, mamma,” Clara replied, looking a little frightened, “it isn’t as impossible as it is unlikely. Stranger things have happened in the world, and will again, and the world is and will be no worse for them. You know I have never been able to acquire the fine art of assuming that ninety-nine facts make a truth.”
“My dear,” said the mother with
precision, “please not to be grandiloquent. Let us confine ourselves to the case in hand. Your sublime generalizing has done you very little credit if it has led you to disturb the peace of a good honest man, and put our own delicacy in question. Coquetry is not only cruel, it is mean and vulgar. Of course you are ready with the childish excuse that you meant no harm. That is not enough for one who has arrived at years of discretion and has a conscience. You must mean something one way or the other.”
Clara’s eyes were suffused with tears. “I think that you misunderstand me, mamma,” she said in a low voice. “I was never in my life so much pleased to have any one like me.”
Mrs. Yorke stopped, and looked at her daughter in astonishment.
“Oh! I know all that you would say, mamma,” the girl went on, half laughing, half weeping. “He is a sailor, which is as if a bird should say, ‘He is a fish.’ He has only a common-school education, as far as books go, and he has none of our ways. But all that doesn’t make his esteem any less worth having. Men of the world often give only a tame, half affection, and are, perhaps, almost sorry when they are accepted. They think of themselves, they think of a thousand other things: he would think of me. When Edith sang, the other evening,