"The girl disappoints me, now that one looks at her as a woman," she said to her husband at breakfast one day, while Kitty sat opposite placidly eating a liberal supply of steak and cakes. She looked up inquiringly. "Yes," vehemently, "at your age I could not have eaten a meal a week after I was engaged. Whenever I heard your father's step I was in a tremor from head to toe. You receive Mr. Muller as though you had been married for years. Not a blush! As cool as any woman of the world!" "But I don't feel any tremor," helping her father to butter. "It's immodest!" Kitty blushed now, but whether from anger or shame no one could tell; for she remained silent. She laid down her knife and fork the next moment, however, and rose. "What I fear is this," said her mother, raising her voice--"Mr. Muller's disappointment. He looks for a womanly, loving wife--" "And I'm not one?" Poor Kitty stood in the doorway swinging her sun-bonnet. She was just then certainly not a morbid, despairing woman, who had made a terrible mistake: nothing but a scared child whom anybody would have hurried to comfort and humor. "I want to do what's right, I'm sure;" and her red under lip began to tremble and the water to gather in her eyes. She sat down to hear the rest of the lecture, but her mother stopped short. Presently, when the chickens came clucking, she went to mix their meal as usual, very pale and dolorous. In an hour she put her head in at the shop-window, her eyes sparkling: "There's two new chicks in the corn-bin nest, and they're full-blooded bantams, I'm sure, father." "She's not fit to be married!" cried Mrs. Guinness excitedly. "She is both silly and unfeeling. God only knows how I came to be the mother of such a child! The great work before her she cares nothing about; and as for Mr. Muller, she doesn't value him as much as a bantam hen. It's her narrow intellect. Her brain is small, as Bluhm said." It was his wife's conscience twitting her, Peter knew. "I would not be uneasy," he said with a cynical smile. "You can't bring love out of her by that sort of friction." But he was himself uneasy. If Catharine had been gloomy, or even thoughtful, at the prospect of her marriage, he would have cared less. But she came in that very day in glee at the sour, critical looks with which some envious young women of the church had followed her; and when her mother called her up stairs to look at a trunkful of embroidered under-clothing which she had kept for this crisis, he could hear Kitty's delighted chatter and giggle for an hour. Evidently her cup of pleasure was full for that day. Was his little girl vulgar, feeble in both heart and mind, as her mother said?