“Why, Ellen,” she pleaded, not without a reproachful sense of vulgarity in such a plea, “don’t you suppose HE ever—kissed any one?”
“That doesn’t concern me, momma,” said Ellen, without a trace of consciousness that she was saying anything uncommon. “If you won’t tell him, then that ends it. I won’t see him.”
“Oh, well!” her mother sighed. “I will try to tell him. But I’d rather be whipped. I know he’ll laugh at me.”
“He won’t laugh at you,” said the girl, confidently, almost comfortingly. “I want him to know everything before I meet him. I don’t want to have a single thing on my mind. I don’t want to think of myself!”
Mrs. Kenton understood the woman—soul that spoke in these words. “Well,” she said, with a deep, long breath, “be ready, then.”
But she felt the burden which had been put upon her to be so much more than she could bear that when she found her husband in their parlor she instantly resolved to cast it upon him. He stood at the window with his hat on.
“Has Breckon been here yet?” he asked.
“Have you seen him yet?” she returned.
“Yes, and I thought he was coming right here. But perhaps he stopped to screw his courage up. He only knew how little it needed with us!”
“Well, now, it’s we who’ve got to have the courage. Or you have. Do you know what Ellen wants to have done?” Mrs. Kenton put it in these impersonal terms, and as a preliminary to shirking her share of the burden.