“The worst thing about me is that I am utterly and entirely worthless,” I began, dropping the words out slowly in the dark. “If God made me, He can’t help but be dreadfully disappointed in me, and wishing He hadn’t. I’m just a wicked white kitten, with a blue ribbon around my neck, kept in a basket, and fed the warm milk of other people’s work and attentions.”
“That is not always the kitten’s fault,” said Gabriel, gently.
“It’s this kitten’s. My family would have liked for me to be strong-minded and go to college and do things in the world. They’ve tried to persuade me. Dudley, my brother, says I have got so much brains held in solution that he is afraid some day something will happen to precipitate them before the world is ready for them; but I ignore them strenuously. My mother is the president of the Home Mission Society that Grandmother Wickliffe founded, and Aunt Grace is state president of the Colonial Daughters, and makes remarkable speeches. I am just a large, white-skinned, well-fed, red-headed bunch of nothing, and I don’t know how to get over it.”
“At least you are of the blessed company of the meek,” answered Gabriel, this time with a real human chuckle that he might have used if he had found three of a kind in a poker-hand.
“Oh, no, I’m not meek,” I hastened to assure him. “I’m the most conceited woman on the earth, the vain kind of conceit that looks in the glass and admires its black lashes and white teeth, and long curves in good frocks, not the intellectual-attainment kind, that has some excuse for existence. I know I’m beautiful, and I hugely enjoy it.”
“You sound beautiful by description, and a few flashes of lightning, added to candle-light, bear you witness. Still, why shouldn’t you appreciate the gifts God has made you? Beauty can have the most wonderful influence in the world in the way of enjoyment for us people at large. Use yours that way when no misguided potatoes call you.” His voice was enthusiastic and delightful, and what he said about the flashes of lightning made me blush so there in the dark that I was sorry one didn’t come that minute and let him see it—the blush. That thought, coming into my mind, cast me into the depths of humiliation that I had had it about him.
“That’s the trouble,” I faltered in unhappy mortification at my instability of character. “I use it to make other people miserable, and know when I do it—men people and things like that.”
“Sometimes that isn’t fair, is it?” he asked after a minute’s pause. “And yet women will do it. What makes them?”
“I don’t know,” I almost sobbed, but controlled it. “I never knew how wrong it was until you talked to Bill about that snuff-stick girl, and how he ought to feel about her, and influence her not to do other men that way. I’m like her, only I do worse than snuff-sticks; and I enjoy it. No, I know God doesn’t want a woman like that.”
“But perhaps you won’t be like that any more. I don’t believe you could, after tasting to-night’s adventure. You lapped up that situation pretty enthusiastically,” he said gently. But somehow there was a hint of amusement in his voice that set my dreadful temper off for a second, and made me wild to convince him of the depths of my sinfulness. I felt that the occasion demanded his serious attention and not levity.