"I don't want to keep her from school, God knows, poor little thing, or from anything else that could do her good.... Only Miss Betsy speaks so sharp.... But I can assure you, sister, we should have put her to the best of schools long and long ago, only that, Heaven knows, we had not the means to do it; and thankful shall I be if you are come at last to think that there may be as much charity in helping your own blood relations, as in giving away your substance to strangers and beggars." "You are right, Mrs. Compton, as far as relates to sending Agnes to school ... that will certainly be a charity. When can the child be got ready?" "As soon as ever you shall be pleased to give us the means, sister Betsy." "Do you mean, Mrs. Compton, that she has not got clothes to go in?" "I do indeed, sister Betsy." "Let me see what she _has_ got, and then I shall know what she wants." "That is easily told, aunt, without your troubling yourself to look over a few ragged frocks and the like. She wants just everything, aunt Betsy," said the bride expectant, brave in anticipated independence, and rather inclined to plague the old lady by drawing as largely as might be on her reluctant funds, now they were opened, even though the profit would not be her own. "If she really does want everything, Martha Compton, while you are dressed as you now are, very cruel injustice has been done her," replied the aunt. "Your sister had no portion given her, either of the patrimony of her father, or the thousand pounds brought by her mother; and as her marriage with a man who had not a sixpence was permitted, this child of hers has an equal right with yourself to share in the property of your parents." "The property of their parents!... Why bless me, Betsy Compton, how you do talk!... as if you did not know that all the property they ever had, is as good as gone. Has not farmer Wright got the estate? And has not the butcher, and the baker, and the shoemaker, and all the rest of them, got what it sold for, as well as my thousand pounds among them, long ago?" "Then you are now on the very verge of ruin, Mrs. Compton?" said the spinster gravely. "Yes, sister Betsy, we are," replied the matron reproachfully. "And I can't but say," she continued, "that a lone woman like you, without any expenses whatever but your own meat and drink, which everybody says is next to nothing,--I can't but say that you might have helped us a little before now, and no harm done." "That is your opinion of the case, Mrs. Compton: mine is wholly different. I think harm is done whenever power of any kind is exerted in vain. I have no power to help you.... Were all I have, poured out upon you, while I lodged myself in the parish workhouse, my conviction is, that I should only be enabling you to commit more follies, and, in my judgment, more sins."