“I don’t suppose Chinese lanterns cost very much,” said Edward.
“Your temper is doubtful this morning,” said Catherine, with a smile. “It is ‘on the go,’ which is usual enough after late hours and the excitement of a dance; but I don’t think you are often so much excited by a dance. Did you see someone whom you admired, Edward? I am sure, if she is a nice girl, I shall be very glad.”
“Perhaps it would be as well not to try, Aunt Catherine; we might not agree about what a nice girl is.”
“No?” said Catherine rather wistfully.
She looked into his doubtful eyes across the breakfast table, and, perhaps for the first time, began to feel that she was not so very certain as she had once been as to what her boy meant. Was it possible after all, that perhaps the words upon which they agreed had different meanings to each? But this was only a passing cloud.
“Who was the belle?” she said smiling; “you can tell me that, at least, if you can’t tell who you admired most.”
Edward paused; and then an impulse of audacity seized him.
“I don’t know if you will like it,” he said, “but if I must tell the truth, I think that girl at the Vernonry—Hester, you know, who is grown up, it appears, and out—”
Catherine bore the little shock with great self-possession, but she felt it.
“Hester. Why should you suppose I would not like it? She must be nineteen, and, of course, she is out. And what of her?” Catherine said, with a grave smile.
She was vexed that Edward should be the one to tell her of the girl’s success, and she was vexed, too, that he should think it would displease her. Why should it displease her? He ought to have kept silence on the subject, and he ought not to have seemed to know that she had any feeling upon it: the suggestion hurt her pride.
“Ellen seems to have taken her up. She has grown up much handsomer than I should have expected, and she was very well dressed, with beautiful pearls—”
“Ah!” said Catherine, with a long breath; “then her mother kept her pearls!” She laughed a moment after, and added, “Of course, she would; what could I have expected? She kept her settlement. Poor little thing! I suppose she did not understand what it meant, and that she was cheating her husband’s creditors.”
“I never quite understood,” said Edward, “why you should have brought her here, and given her a house, when she is still in possession of that income.”
“She has only a scrap of it. Poor little thing! She neither knew it was wrong to take it, nor that if she did keep it, it ought not to have been allowed to go for his after debts. She got muddled altogether among them. The greater part of it she mortgaged for him, so that there was only a pittance left. Whatever you may think, you young men, it is a drawback for a man when he marries a fool. And so she kept her pearls!” Catherine added, with a laugh of contempt.
“Marrying a fool, however, must have its advantages,” said Edward, “since a woman with brains would probably have given up the settlement altogether.”
“Advantages—if you think them advantages!” Catherine said, with a flash of her eyes such as Edward had seldom seen. “And certainly would not have kept the pearls—which are worth a good deal of money,” she added, however, with her habitual laugh. “I think they must have dazzled you, my boy, these pearls.”
“I am sure they did,” said Edward composedly; “they took away my breath. I have seen her here often, a dowdy little girl” (he scorned himself for saying these words, yet he said them, though even his cheek reddened with the sense of self-contempt) “with no ornaments at all.”
“No,” said Catherine; “to do Mrs. John justice, she had as much sense as that. She would not have put those pearls on a girl’s neck, unless she was dressed conformably. Oh, she has sense enough for that. I suppose she had a pretty dress—white? But of course it would be white; at the first ball—and looked well, you say?”
“Very handsome,” said Edward, gravely. He did not look up to meet the look of awakened alarm, wonder, doubt, and rousing up of her faculties to meet a new danger, which was in Catherine’s eyes. He kept his on his plate and ate his breakfast with great apparent calm, though he knew very well, and had pleasure in thinking, that he had planted an arrow in her. “By the way,” he said, after an interval, “where did John Vernon pick his wife up? I hear she is of good family—and was it her extravagance that brought about his ruin? These are details I have never heard.”
“It is not necessary to enter into such old stories,” said Catherine, somewhat stiffly. “He met her, I suppose, as young men meet unsuitable people everywhere; but we must do justice. I don’t think she had any share in the ruin, any more at least than a woman’s legitimate share,” she added, with a laugh that was somewhat grim. “He was fond of every kind of indulgence, and then speculated to mend matters. Beware of speculation, Edward. Extravagance is bad, but speculation is ruin. In the one case you may have to buy your pleasures very dear, but in the other there is no pleasure, nothing but destruction and misery.”
“Is not that a little hard, Aunt Catherine? there is another side to it. Sometimes a colossal fortune instead of destruction, as you say; and in the meantime a great deal of excitement and interest, which are pleasures in their way.”
“The pleasure of balancing on the point of a needle over the bottomless pit,” she said. “If I were not very sure that you
