"Oh, mother, you are unforgiving!"

"Of course I am; I am Scotch."

"You have not one son-in-law but this who would give you back the large amount your husband has misspent - not one who could do it but at a sacrifice you would not permit. For you and papa, to restore your faith in each other, I married our stranger creditor, forcing him to the altar rather than he me; and he has already proved himself of more delicacy than you, if I am to believe you are in your right mind. No, I am no McLane."

"You are not, if you do not use their Scotch-Irish perseverance to get the better of Meshach Milburn. You have obtained a marriage settlement with him, now have it confirmed, and sue out your divorce before the Legislature! Publicly as you have been profaned, ask the State of Maryland for reparation. The McLanes, the Custises, and all their connections, from the Christine River to the James, will storm Annapolis, make your cause, if necessary, a political issue, and the courts of this county will give you damages out of this beast's unpopular wealth."

Vesta looked at her mother with astonishment.

"What would become of my self-respect, my maiden name, if I made that show of my private griefs, mother?"

"Why, you would be a heroine. Every old lover, of whom there are so many eligible ones, would feel his zeal return. A romance would attend your name wherever the Baltimore newspapers are taken, and you would be as great a heroine as Betty Patterson."

"That disobedient girl?" Vesta, still in astonishment, exclaimed.

"I saw her when the bride of Jerome Bonaparte. She was not half as lovely as you! If Jerome had seen you - you were not born, then, and I was in society - he would never have looked at Betty. But, you see, she forced a settlement out of the Emperor, husbanded the income of it, and she is rich, and freer to-day than if she had become a French Bonaparte."

"Weak as they may be in many things, I am a Custis," Vesta spoke, with pale scorn. "I would not drag my name through the tobacco-stained lobbies of Annapolis to wear the crown of Josephine. The word I gave, in pity of my parents, to the man who is now my husband, to become his wife, I would not take back to my dying day, unless he first denied his word. I believe there is such a thing as honor yet. Mother, you fret my father by such principles."

"They are the principles of your uncle, Allan McLane."

"A man I shrink from," Vesta said, "although he is your brother. His unfeeling respectability, his unchangeableness, his want of every impulse but hate, his appropriation of our family honor, as if he was our lawgiver and high-sheriff, his secretiveness, formal religion, and mysterious prosperity, I do not appreciate, much as I have tried to be charitable to him. I do not like Baltimore as I do the Eastern Shore; it is fierce, hard, and suspicious."