“I know money means nothing to you, John,” said Keturah, sarcastically, “but it might mean something to someone else. You’re forgetting her, John, you’re forgetting the girl. Money can’t buy me some things I want, maybe, and it can’t buy you some things you want, maybe; but it can buy her things she’ll want. You’ve no right to throw away her chance!” Her brother, his eyes on the child, seemed just perceptibly to waver, and then he burst out: “What’s at the bottom of this? What are _you_ after?” Keturah, calmed a little by the success of her argument, answered him: “It might be just wanting to have a young and growing creature around me, John! It might be that I’m not the inhuman creature you take me for, that I’m sometimes lonely; that company would cheer me up; that I might even be a softer body than I’m generally considered to be if I had someone to talk to and listen to and work for and with! It might be all that, but I won’t tax your powers of belief, brother, by asking you to suppose so. No! The real reason is simply this--” her excitement returned and she appeared almost feminine in her rage--“that I am just human enough, and just woman enough, and just fool enough to hate having people say my own brother couldn’t trust his adopted daughter to live with me, and had to farm her out to Susan and Henry Biggles to care for!” The keeper was impressed. There was no denying Keturah spoke the truth, so far as her own feeling was concerned. She, who cared nothing for the good will of her neighbours, for gossip, for backbiting, for well-earned dislike or worse, she, Keturah Smiley, with her grasping ways and her old clothes and her bitter tongue, had a streak of femininity--or plain humanity--left in her after all these years. She could still care for public opinion on some things. They might call her stingy, mean, heartless in many ways; they might laugh at her, sneer at her, and hate her for many things; but that they should hold her in contempt; that they should be able to say that her own brother would not trust her with his little girl--that she dreaded. The prospect of it cut her like a lash. She might not care what people said about her behaviour toward John Smiley’s wife, for John Smiley’s wife had run away and left him, taking their baby, and so had sealed her unworthiness. She _would_ care what people said about her behaviour toward John Smiley’s daughter, whether a daughter of his own blood or a waif washed ashore from the ocean. She cared about that now and she would continue to care. John Smiley saw this and knew that he held a hostage for her good behaviour. While the feeling lasted, anyway.... He spoke gently: “Mermaid, would you be willing to live with my sister here, and go to school?”