“Now, Doris, I have told you already I don’t want any back answerings. You’re my daughter, and I want to see you well married. When I’m dying I don’t want to be thinking of you sitting round a boarding-house about the time you should be a grandmother.”
“There’s lots of time, Mother.”
“There ain’t lots of time, and you know it. Don’t you know, really, there ain’t a Charlie Lien to be picked up every day.”
“But, Mother, I can’t pick him—”
“Doris,” the mother’s voice was rising in anger, “what did I say about back answerings?”
“Well, Mother, do please give me time to think. Assuming Charlie is having a harmless flirtation—”
“Harmless flirtation, indeed, with a hussy that has no money, and no good clothes to set off what few good looks she has got—”
At this point I heard a door slam. Evidently Doris had left her mamma whose voice was getting coarser every second the controversy continued. “Hussy indeed!” I thought. Her Doris! Bah! But how in the name of fortune did Doris learn of my doings with Charlie Lien. Of course, no mention was made of the Palm-room, which is a comfort. And how coarse the mother’s voice became as it gained in heat. Her “ain’ts” and her “back answerings”—Oh! to think of my having toadied to her! I painted her picture at my age, a buxom slattern, that is what she was, a slattern, the butt of every jolly cavalier who felt a budding wit; bare feet, possibly, and dirty petticoats, tattered and torn! And her home, the tavern at the dusty corner, the long intervals between the coming and going of guests; the wild acclaim, the shouted jest, the latest news from the seat of war, political, or otherwise.
And to think that I, Elsie Travers, toadied to her!
The conversation I have recorded I heard on Sunday night. Of course, there has been nothing else to record—beyond the fact that we travelled by the same train as the Mounts.