'Papa says so. And mamma says so. I don't get any feeling at home. Annabella is wholly engaged in getting up parties to go to Dane Rollo's readings in Morton Hollow; that's all she thinks about. Isn't he too ridiculous?'
'I asked about Mr. Charteris,' said Wych Hazel, knitting her brows a little. 'And it is you who must live with himnot your father and mother. Could you do it, Josephine? with him alone?'
'One must live with somebody, I suppose,' said Josephine, idly pulling threads of wool from a foot mat near her.
'Well could you live without him?' said her questioner, taking a short cut to her point of view.
'Charteris? He ain't the jolliest man I know.'
'Answer!' said Hazel, knitting her brows again.
'Live without Charteris? I should say I could. From my present point of view. Easy! But it comes back to that awful bore, Hazel; a girl has got to be married. I wish I was a man.'
'Live without Mr. Charteris. And as you cannot be a man, suppose you talk like a woman.'
'What do you mean?' said Phinney, looking doubtfully at her. 'I haven't come here to be snubbed, I know. Aren't you sorry for me?'
'No,not when you talk so. A girl has not "got to be married." And if you marry some one you can live without, you deserve what you will get.'
'John Charteriswithout the bouquets and the fooling.'
'I don't know but he's very good,' said Josephine meditatively. 'And Hazel, a girl can't live without getting married. What should I do, for instance?'
'Wait till the right person comes,' said Hazel. 'And if he never comes, be thankful that you escaped the wrong one.'
'But suppose the right person, as you call him, is poor?' said the young lady with a peculiar subdued inflexion of voice.
'O, is that it!' said Wych Hazel. 'Then if he thinks you can make him rich. I would keep up the delusion.'
'But I _can't_, Hazel. Papa hasn't much to give any of us. He has just enough to get along with comfortably.'
'There are other things in the world besides money, I suppose?' said Hazel. 'And I know there could be no starvation wages for me, like diamonds from a hand I did not love.'
'I like diamonds though,' said Josephine. 'And it's dreadful to be poor. _You_ don't know anything about it, Hazel. You're of no consequence, you have no power, nobody cares about you, even you've got to ask leave to speak; and then nobody listens to you! I mean, after you are too old to flirt. I don't want to be poor. And Mr. Charteris would put me beyond all that. He has plenty. And they say I would love him well enough by and by. It's such a bore!' And the young lady leaned her head upon her hand with a really disconsolate face.