She had finished her breakfast some time before the young man, and because it would have appeared very wrong to her to leave the table, she sat on knitting behind the tea-urn: an industry the benefit of which was felt by many poor children—almost the only neighbours she had a good word for.
“Mother,” said the young man, presently, “your friend the locum tenens is off to-morrow.”
“A good riddance.”
“Why are you so hard on him? He talked intelligently when here, I thought,” answered her son.
“I do not like his theology,” she replied, “nor his way of running about and flirting with this body and that body, nor his way of chattering while he buttons and unbuttons his gloves.”
“You forget he is a man of the great world, and has about him a manner that must seem strange to us.”
“Oh, he might do very well,” she answered, “for one of those Carton girls at the rectory.”
“That eldest girl is a good girl,” replied her son.
“She looks down on us all, and thinks herself intellectual,” she went on. “I remember when girls were content with their Catechism and their Bibles and a little practice at the piano, maybe, for an accomplishment. What does any one want more? It is all pride.”
“You used to like her as a child,” said the young man.