FullReads

“Why, Ethel!” Mrs. Weaver’s voice was full of astonished disapproval. “I should think you’d be ashamed to say such a thing.”

“I didn’t say it; Rob said it,” returned the girl, making a little grimace at herself in the glass.

“Well, I have my opinion of a young man that will say such a thing to a girl. If a girl’s worth having, she’s worth coming after.”

Mrs. Weaver made this latter announcement with an air of triumph in its triteness. Her daughter gave a little sniff of contempt.

“Well, if a fellow’s worth having, isn’t he worth going to?” she asked with would-be flippancy.

“Why, Ethel Imogen Weaver!” Mrs. Weaver repeated her daughter’s name slowly, as if she hoped its length might arouse in the owner some sense of her worth. “I never did hear the like.”

The girl left the mirror, and seated herself in a chair in front of her mother.

“It’ll cost Rob a hundred dollars to come here and go back to California, and a hundred dollars goes a long way toward fixing up. Besides, he’ll lose his job. I’d just as soon go out there as have him come here. If people don’t like it they–they needn’t.”

The girl’s fresh young voice began to thicken, and she glanced about in restless search of diversion from impending tears.

“Well, girls do act awful strange these days.”

Mrs. Weaver took warning from her daughter’s tone and divided her disapproval by multiplying its denominator.

“Yes, they do. They act sometimes as if they had a little sense,” retorted Ethel huskily.

“Well, I don’t know as I call it sense to pick up and run after a man, even if you’re engaged to him; do you, mother?”

Old Mrs. Moxom started nervously at her daughter-in-law’s appeal.

“Well, it does seem a long way to go on–on an uncertainty, Ethel,” she faltered.

The girl turned a flushed, indignant face upon her grandmother.

“Well, I hope you don’t mean to call Rob an uncertainty?” she demanded angrily.

“Oh, no; I don’t mean that,” pleaded the old woman. “I haven’t got anything agen’ Rob. I don’t suppose he’s any more uncertain than–than the rest of them. I”–

“Why, grandmother Moxom,” interrupted the girl, “how you talk! I’m sure father isn’t an uncertainty, and there wasn’t anything uncertain about grandfather Moxom. To tell the honest truth, I think they’re just about as certain as we are.”

The old woman got up and began to move the chairs about with purposeless industry.

“It’s awful hard to know what to do sometimes,” she said, indulging in a generality that might be mollifying, but was scarcely glittering.

“Well, it isn’t hard for me to know this time,” said Mrs. Weaver, her features drawn into a look of pudgy determination. “No girl of mine shall ever go traipsing off to California alone on any such wild-goose chase.”

Ethel got up and moved toward the stairway, her tawny head thrown back, and an eloquent accentuation of heel in her tread.

“I just believe old folks like for young folks to be foolish and wasteful,” she said over her shoulder, “so they can have something to nag them about. I’m sure I”–She slammed the door upon her voice, which seemed to be carried upward in a little whirlwind of indignation.

Mrs. Weaver glanced at her mother-in-law for sympathy, but the old woman refused to meet her gaze.

“I’m just real mad at Rob Kendall for suggesting such a thing and getting Ethel all worked up,” clucked the younger woman anxiously.

Mrs. Moxom came back to her chair as aimlessly as she had left it.

“Men-folks are kind of helpless when it comes to planning,” she said apologetically. “To think of them poor things trying to keep house–and the biscuits being soggy! It does kind of work on her feelings, Emma.”

Mrs. Weaver gave her mother-in-law a glance of rotund severity.

“I don’t mind their getting married,” she said, “but I want it done decent. I don’t intend to pack my daughter off to any man as if she wasn’t worth coming after, biscuits or no biscuits!”