“Well, I can' t say I did,” said Mrs. Barclay. “We had a terrible time getting used to one another's ways. You see, he'd waited a good while, and was some older than I was. After a while, though, we settled down, and now I'm awful glad I let my father manage for me. You see, what your pa had and what my father settled on me made us comfortable, and if a couple is that it's a sight more than the pore ones are.”
Dolly stood before her mother, close enough to touch her. Her face wore an indescribable expression of dissatisfaction with what she had heard.
“Mother, tell me one thing,” she said. “Did you ever let either of those boys—the two that you didn't marry, I mean—kiss you?”
Mrs. Barclay stared up at her daughter for an instant and then her face broke into a broad smile of genuine amusement. She lowered her head to her knee and laughed out.
“Dolly Barclay, you are such a fool!” she said, and then she laughed again almost immoderately, her face in her lap.
“I know what that means,” said Dolly, in high disgust. “Mother, I don't think you can do me any good. You'd better go to bed.”
Mrs. Barclay rose promptly.
“I think I'd better, too,” she said. “It makes your pa awful mad for me to sit up this way. I don't want to hear him rail out like he always does when he catches me at it.”
After her mother had gone, Dolly sat down on her bed. “She never was in love,” she told herself. “Never, never, never! And it is a pity. She never could have talked that way if she had really loved anybody as much as—” But Dolly did not finish what lay on her tongue. However, when she had drawn the covers up over her the cold tears rose in her eyes and rolled down on her pillow as she thought of Alan Bishop's brave and dignified suffering.
“Poor fellow!” she said. “Poor, dear Alan!”