“Ellen has always been very reserved. It would have been better for her if she hadn’t. Oh, I scarcely dare to hope anything! Rufus, I feel that in everything of this kind we are very ignorant and inexperienced.”
“Inexperienced!” Renton retorted. “I don’t want any more experience of the kind Ellen has given us.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean—this Mr. Breckon. I can’t tell what attracts him in the child. She must appear very crude and uncultivated to him. You needn’t resent it so! I know she’s read a great deal, and you’ve made her think herself intellectual—but the very simple-heartedness of the way she would show out her reading would make such a young man see that she wasn’t like the girls he was used to. They would hide their intellectuality, if they had any. It’s no use your trying to fight it Mr. Kenton. We are country people, and he knows it.”
“Tuskingum isn’t country!” the judge declared.
“It isn’t city. And we don’t know anything about the world, any of us. Oh, I suppose we can read and write! But we don’t know the a, b, c of the things he, knows. He, belongs to a kind of society—of people—in New York that I had glimpses of in the winter, but that I never imagined before. They made me feel very belated and benighted—as if I hadn’t, read or thought anything. They didn’t mean to; but I couldn’t help it, and they couldn’t.”
“You—you’ve been frightened out of your propriety by what you’ve seen in New York,” said her husband.
“I’ve been frightened, certainly. And I wish you had been, too. I wish you wouldn’t be so conceited about Ellen. It scares me to see you so. Poor, sick thing, her looks are all gone! You must see that. And she doesn’t dress like the girls he’s used to. I know we’ve got her things in New York; but she doesn’t wear them like a New-Yorker. I hope she isn’t going in for MORE unhappiness!”
At the thought of this the judge’s crest fell. “Do you believe she’s getting interested in him?” he asked, humbly.
“No, no; I don’t say that. But promise me you won’t encourage her in it. And don’t, for pity’s sake, brag about her to him.”
“No, I won’t,” said the judge, and he tacitly repented having done so.