“I don’t know. I shouldn’t like to promise you that. But sometimes I think I could have been a good mother, or at least that children would have made a good mother of me, for I believe that half the goodness that women get credit for is forced upon them by those little helpless troubles. Men could be just as good if they had the care and burden of children—men are so very near being very good as it is.”
“I know it,” sighed Mrs. Farrell. “I never knew my own mother,” she added; “if I had, I might have been a better woman. But are we to blame, I wonder, that we are not so good as we might have been—you if you’d had children, and I if I had had a mother?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I dare say we shall never be judged so harshly anywhere else as we are in this world.”
“That’s true!” said Mrs. Farrell, bitterly.
“Not that we don’t stand in need of judgment,” continued the other, “as much as we do of mercy. It’s wholesome, and I’ve never been unjustly blamed yet that I didn’t feel I deserved it all, and more. Oh, Mrs. Farrell, if I were really to speak to you as my daughter—”
“Don’t call me Mrs. Farrell! Call me by my own name,” cried the younger woman, impulsively. “Call me—Rosabel.”
“Is that your name? I took it for granted you were Isabel. It’s a very pretty name, very sweet and quaint; but I won’t call you by it; it would make you more of a stranger to me than Mrs. Farrell does.”
“Well, no matter. You shall call me what you like. Come; you said if you were to speak to me as your daughter—”
“Oh, I’m not certain whether I can go on, after all. Perhaps what I was going to say would degenerate into a kind of lecture on love and marriage in the abstract. If I had a daughter whose love affair had been so romantic as yours, I believe I should tell her to make all the surer of her heart on account of the romance. I’m afraid that in matters of love, romance is a dangerous element. Love ought to be perfectly ordinary, regular, and every-day like.”
“Those are very heretical ideas!” said Mrs. Farrell, shaking her head.