“Pleasure!” said her mother. “It’s very little pleasure I have had in my life since I marriet your father and came to this quiet place. Na, na, it’s no pleasure--I was very light-hearted in my nature though you would not think it. But that’s a thing that cannot last.”
“But you had it, mother,” said Mary, “even if it was short. There was that ball you went to when you were sixteen, and the spangled muslin you had on, and the officer that tore it with his spurs.”
Mrs. Douglas’s eyes lit up with a faint reflection of bygone fire. “Eh, that spangled muslin,” she said, “I’ll never forget it, and what they all said to me when I came home. It was not like the grand gowns that are the fashion now. It was one of the last of the old mode before those awfu’ doings at the French Revolution that changed everything. My mother wore a hoop under her gown standing out round her like a cart-wheel. I was not old enough for that; but there was enough muslin in my petticoat to have made three of these bit skimpit things.”
“I just wish,” said Mary with a sigh, “that we had it now.”
“It would be clean out of the fashion if ye had it; and what would ye do with a spangled muslin here? Ye must have parties to go to, before ye have any need for fine cla’es.”
Mary breathed again that profound sigh. “There’s the ball at the Castle,” she said.
“Lord keep us!” cried her mother. “Your faither would take our heads off our shoulders if ye breathed a word of that.”
“But they say the whole country’s going,” said Kirsteen; “it’s like as if we were just nobody to be always held back.”
“Your father thinks of nothing but the boys,” said Mrs. Douglas, with a feeble wail; “it’s aye for them he’s planning. Ye’ll bring nothing in, he says, and he’ll have you take little out.”
There was a pause after this--indignation was strong in Kirsteen’s heart, but there was also a natural piety which arrested her speech. The injustice, the humiliation and hard bondage of the iron rule under which she had been brought up, but which she had only now begun to look upon as anything more than the rule of nature, was what was uppermost in her thoughts. Mary’s mind was not speculative. She did not consider humiliation or injustice. The practical affected her more, which no doubt was in every way a more potent argument. “I just wonder,” she said, “that he has not more sense--for if we were away altogether we would take nothing out--and that cannot be if nobody knows that we are here.”