With a sigh her daughter rose and walked through the veranda into the gardens beyond, and thence into the pine-woods. She felt the utter impossibility of ever bringing her mother’s mind into any unison with her own. It was wholly useless to attempt to reach and touch a chord which did not exist. If she pursued the course which she thought right, she must do so in spite of her mother, and alone in her choice. Margaret Massarene loved her daughter, but she thought Katherine was a “crank.” She could see no reason why they should not both of them enjoy the good things poor William had left behind him. She was a good and honest woman; but in Kerosene City the moral feelings lose their sensitiveness, and she could not follow Katherine’s reasonings; she considered them high-flown, and a pack of nonsense. “As for fortunes being made honest,” said Margaret Massarene to herself, “’tis a pack of stuff to dream of it. You can’t no more make a big fortune with clean hands than you can stack a dung heap.” But when the fortune, however accumulated, was made, it seemed to her flying in the face of an all-seeing Providence to quarrel with it, and to “climb down.” Whoever did climb down if they could help it? “You would not like to visit America, mother?” Katherine said to her a few days later. Margaret Massarene gasped. “America? The States?” “The States, yes--Dakota.” “Ropes shouldn’t drag me,” replied her mother with unusual firmness. “Oh, Lord! The food served all higgledy-piggledy, sour and sweet all running amuck; the trains a-peering in at your sixth floor window; the men hanging on to hooks in the crowd of the cars; the spittle all over the place; the rush and the crush and the pother never still. Go back there? No; you should kill me first!” She was roused to unusual self-assertion and emphasis. “Only for a visit,” said Katherine timidly. “And what for--for a visit?” repeated Mrs. Massarene. “Now I’ve got back, I’ll stay where I am. Many and many a night I’ve lain awake in that hell; for hell ’tis, with the railways a-shrieking and rumbling past the windows, and the furnace chimneys a-bellowing fire and smoke, and the whistles a-screaming, and the pistons a-thumping; and I’ve thought of the old home and cried till I was blind, and said to myself, if ever a good God let me go back, I’d stay at home if I swept the streets for a living. _I_ don’t fly in the face of Providence, Katherine.” “But your home was in Ulster!” “You don’t want to be throwing that in my teeth. I wasn’t brought up a fine English lady like you. But Europe’s Europe and the States is the States; and I won’t cross that grey, wild water again; no, not if you kill me!” “Of course, my dear mother, you shall do as you wish.”