“Will you seriously promise to speak to him? At once?--this very week?” “I promise,” said Tramlay, solemnly, at the same time wickedly making a number of mental reservations. “Then if there should be any mistake it will not be too late to recall poor Mr. Marge,” said Mrs. Tramlay. “My dear wife,” said Tramlay, tenderly, “I know Marge has some good qualities, but I beg you to remember that by the time our daughter ought to be in the very prime of her beauty and spirits, unless her health fails, Marge will be nearly seventy years old. I can’t bear the thought of our darling being doomed to be nurse to an old man just when she will be most fit for the companionship and sympathy of a husband. Suppose that ten years ago, when you boasted you didn’t feel a day older than when you were twenty, I had been twenty years older than I am now, and hanging like a dead weight about your neck? Between us we have had enough to do in bringing up our children properly: what would you have done had all the responsibility come upon you alone? And you certainly don’t care to think of the probability of Lu being left a widow before she fairly reaches middle age?” “Handsome widows frequently marry again, especially if their first husbands were well off.” “Wife!” Mrs. Tramlay looked guilty, and avoided her husband’s eye. She could not avoid his encircling arm, though, nor the meaning of his voice as he said,-- “Is there no God but society?” “I didn’t mean to,” whispered Mrs. Tramlay. “All mothers are looking out for their daughters; I don’t think fathers understand how necessary it is. If you had shown more interest in Lucia’s future I might not have been so anxious. Fathers never seem to think that their daughters ought to have husbands.” “Fathers don’t like girls to marry before they are women,” said Tramlay. “Even now I wish Lu might not marry until she is several years older.” “Mercy!” exclaimed Mrs. Tramlay. “Would you want the poor child to go through several more years of late parties, and dancing, and dressing? Why, she’d become desperate, and want to go into a nunnery or become a novelist, or reformer, or something.” “What? Is society really so dreadful to a young girl?” asked the husband. “It’s the most tiresome thing in the world after the novelty wears off,” said Mrs. Tramlay, “unless she is fond of flirting, or gets into one of the prosy sets where they talk about nothing but books and music and pictures and blue china and such things.” “‘Live and learn,’” quoted the merchant. “Next time I become a young man and marry I’ll bring up my family in the country. My sisters had at least horses and trees and birds and flowers and chickens to amuse them, and not one of them married until she was twenty-five.”