All you have to do is to write a letter,
saying: 'I expect you,' or, what is better, take to-morrow's steamer for
Baltimore and use your Uncle Allan's house and become engaged and
married there."
"Mamma," Vesta spoke without rebuke, only with a sad, confirmed feeling
of her destiny, "I could be capable of deceiving any of those gentlemen
if I could so heartlessly leave my father."
"Deceiving!" Mrs. Custis remarked, filling her palm and brow with the
cologne. "What is man's whole work with a woman but deceit? To court her
for her money, to kiss her into taking her money out of good mortgages
and putting it into bog iron ore? To tell her when past middle life that
she has nothing to live upon, except the charity of the public, or her
reluctant friends. All this for an experiment! The Custis family are all
knaves or fools. Your father is a monster."
Vesta went to her mother's side and bathed her forehead.
"Dear mamma," she said, "let you and I do something for ourselves, while
papa looks around and finds something to do. We can rent a house in
Princess Anne and open a seminary. I can teach French and music, you can
be the matron and do the correspondence and business, and if papa is at
a loss for larger occupation he can lecture on history and science. Our
friends will send their children to us, and we shall never be separated.
I will give up the thought of marriage and live for you two.
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