“What did you say to him, Alice?” asked her mother, unshaken by her rhetoric.
“I told him he was a faithless person.”
“Then you were a cruel girl,” cried Mrs. Pasmer, with sudden indignation; “and if you were not my daughter I could be glad he had escaped you. I don't know where you got all those silly, romantic notions of yours about these things. You certainly didn't get them from me,” she continued, with undeniable truth, “and I don't believe you get them from your Church, It's just as Miss Anderson said: your Church makes allowance for human nature, but you make none.”
“I shouldn't go to Julia Anderson for instruction in such matters,” said the girl, with cold resentment.
“I wish you would go to her for a little commonsense—or somebody,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “Do you know what talk this will make?”
“I don't care for the talk. It would be worse than talk to marry a man whom I couldn't trust—who wanted to please me so much that he had to deceive me, and was too much afraid of me to tell me the truth.”
“You headstrong girl!” said her mother impartially, admiring at the same time the girl's haughty beauty.
There was an argument in reserve in Mrs. Pasmer's mind which perhaps none but an American mother would have hesitated to urge; but it is so wholly our tradition to treat the important business of marriage as a romantic episode that even she could not bring herself to insist that her daughter should not throw away a chance so advantageous from every worldly point of view. She could only ask, “If you break this engagement, what do you expect to do?”
“The engagement is broken. I shall go into a sisterhood.”
“You will do nothing of the kind, with my consent,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “I will have no such nonsense. Don't flatter yourself that I will. Even if I approved of such a thing, I should think it wicked to let you do it. You're always fancying yourself doing something very devoted, but I've never seen you ready to give up your own will, or your own comfort even, in the slightest degree. And Dan Mavering, if he were twice as temporising and circuitous”—the word came to her from her talk with him—“would be twice too good for you. I'm going to breakfast.”