“Why? Wasn’t he good enough?” sneeringly.

Fair looked at her in surprise.

“I don’t know why you should talk so snappish about it, Miss Platt,” she said resentfully. “If my mother doesn’t wish me to keep company with gentlemen, it isn’t any business of yours, is it?”

The greenish fire of a jealous hate leaped into the blue eyes regarding Fair so keenly, but, forcing a mirthless laugh, the embroiderer retorted:

“Oh, so she don’t want you to keep company with gentlemen at all—is that it? A strange notion. Why, I should think she would be glad to have you marry and get off her hands.”

Fair’s temper was rapidly rising under the sneering remarks of the new girl, and, with flashing eyes, she replied saucily:

“Glad to have me married and off her hands, indeed, when I am her only support! No, I thank you, Miss Platt. Besides, mother tells me often[Pg 10] that she would rather see me in my grave than the wife of a poor man.”

[Pg 10]

“Wants you to marry a rich man, eh?” Miss Platt exclaimed bitterly, and Fair responded impudently:

“Yes, indeed, if I could get one, thank you.”

A peal of laughter followed the sally, for all the girls thought it very ridiculous, the idea of a poor little sewing girl aspiring to a rich husband. Fair colored high at their mirth, for she had been jesting, and now she said tartly:

“You needn’t any of you think I am expecting or hoping to get a rich husband, for I don’t desire it. I mean, I don’t want to marry anybody, rich or poor; but I may as well say what I think, and that is that I wouldn’t marry a poor man—no, not even if I loved him to distraction, for my mother says that when poverty comes in at the door love flies out at the window; and she ought to know, for her experience was hard enough.”

Fair had quoted “my mother” so often on this same subject that the girls were all familiar with her story, which was that of a pampered rich girl who had married beneath her own station in life, been disinherited, and then driven her impecunious[Pg 11] husband to drink by her repinings after the luxuries she had lost, and reproaches because she had so hard a life. He was dead now, and his widow, battling for long years with the grim fiends of poverty and ill health, had 

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