Star-Dust. Fannie Hurst
swear it, papa. I know I'm inarticulate, I don't seem able to explain the terrible state I've been in for days—"
"It's nervousness, Lilly."
"I tell you, no! I can't make you understand. But I'm not cut out, papa, for what I'm going to settle down to. I'm something else than what you think I am. I guess I—I am a sort of botanical sport, papa, off our family tree. I know what you're going to say, and maybe you're right. I may have more ideas than I have talent, but let me go my way. Let me be what I am."
"Lilly, Lilly, let us take this thing step by step, quietly. Surely, daughter, you appreciate the enormity of the situation!"
"I do. I do."
"Now to go back to the beginning. Did you consent to this engagement of your own free will?"
"I did and I didn't."
"You didn't?"
"Oh, I know you let me decide for myself, but don't you think I felt the undercurrent of your attitudes? All the other girls settling down, as you put it. You and Albert such good friends, and then Albert himself so—so what he should be."
"Now you are talking. If your mother and I hadn't felt that Albert was the fine and upright man for their little girl to marry, do you think they would have—"
"I know! There we go around in the circle again. Everything is perfect. The little house, Albert's promotion to first assistant. Everything perfect, but me. I don't want it. I don't love him. You hear me! There is something in me he hasn't touched. Respect him? Yes, but respect is only a poor relation to love and comes in for the left-over and the cast-off emotions."
"Her head is full of the novels she reads!"
"You can't keep me from thinking like a woman. Feeling like one. Is it shameful to want to love? Is it wrong to desire in the man you are to marry that fundamental passion that makes the world go around? I'm not supposed to know any thing about the thing I'm plunging into until after I've plunged! I'm afraid, papa. Save me!"
"Ben, I could swear who is at the bottom of this indecent talk of hers. I found his picture cut out of the school magazine and pasted in her diary. She's a changed child since that Lindsley came to the High School the year before she graduated."
"Mamma! Mamma!" fairly exploded to her feet by the potency of her sense of outrage. "Oh, you—you—"
"I know I'm right."
"Why, I haven't even seen him since I graduated! I've never talked ten words to the man in my life! Oh—oh—how can you?"
"Just the same, he's been your ruination. Since you got him into your head not one of the boys you met has been good enough. I knew you had him in mind the day you told me you wished Albert was a little more bookish and musical. I know why you wanted him to subscribe to the Symphony. The spats you made him buy. Poor boy! and his ankles aren't cut for them. Love! Your father and I weren't so much in love, let me tell you. Only I knew my parents wanted it and that was enough. I wish to God I'd never lived to see this day—"
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