“That’s just it, ma’am. She won’t hear to it,” said Cornelia Emmeline sadly. “She says I’m too young to have the care of a home.”
I looked at the stout proportions of Little Charge who had to be carried and lifted all day.
“So you planned to elope?” I tempted her on. “And why didn’t you?”
Then her heart overflowed.
“We was to go to the church to-night,” she sobbed. “Evan, he told the m-m-minister, an’ I was goin’ to wear my new p-p-plum-colour’ dress, an’ it was a-goin’ to be at six-fifteen. Evan has a hour off at six. An’ th-then th-this morning She gimme a bright fifty cents an’ a watered ribbin—an’ O, ma’am, I just can’t a-bear to go an’ do it!”
So—Benefactress was even shrewder than I had thought.
“Have you told him?” I asked, feeling with Evan the hopelessness of competing with “a bright fifty cents an’ a watered ribbin.”
She nodded speechlessly for a moment.
“Jus’ now,” she burst out finally. “I went to the drug store an’ told him. He d-d-didn’t say a word, but he jus’ went on makin’ a egg-phosphate, in a heartbroke way, for a ole gentleman. He never l-l-looked at me again.”
I sat in sad silence going over the principal points of the narrative. Nothing makes me so sorrowful as the very ordinary sight of two young lovers juggling with their future. There are so few chances for happiness in every life, “and that hardly,” and yet upon these irreverent hands are constantly laid, and all the hues despoiled. Thereafter the two despoilers are wont to proclaim happiness a bubble. I do not know if that be true, but say that it is a bubble. Is it not better to have so luminous a thing ever trembling over one’s head than to see, through one’s tears, its fragments float away? If happiness be a bubble, Pelleas and I know of one that has outlasted many a stouter element and will last to the end. Yet what can Seventy say of this to Seventeen? It can only wring its hands, and Seventeen has but one answer: “But this is different!” I could have shaken Cornelia Emmeline had it not been for our brief acquaintance.