But plague upon it! I could not get on with her mother; and here I was, before our summer holiday was over, and before we had settled down to that home life in which trouble and annoyance must needs come, getting out of patience and saying cruel things; and there was Bessie, sitting in the summer twilight with a light shawl drawn over her shoulders, pouting her pretty lips with vexation, and digging the toes of her little boots into the balustrade in front of us, because I had expressed a pious wish that her mother was in Jericho. I declare, if there weren't tears gathering in her gentle blue eyes!
I was angry with myself, and, putting my arm around her slender waist, I laid my cheek against hers and said soothingly, "Never mind, darling! I didn't mean it. Don't think any more about it."
But as we sat for the next five minutes without saying a word, I couldn't help pondering on the possibilities of the future, for Mrs. Pinkerton was to live with us. That was one of the understood conditions of our bargain, and it was evident that she was to furnish the test of all my good resolutions.
Mrs. Pinkerton had been left a widow when Bessie was twelve years old, with a neat little cottage in the suburbs of the city and a snug competence in a secure investment. I was fairly settled in business, with an income that would enable us to live in modest comfort, and was determined not to disturb the investment or have it drawn upon in any way for household expenses. But the old lady--I already began to speak of her by that disrespectful epithet, although she was still under fifty--was to live with us. I had readily acquiesced in that arrangement, for was it not my darling's wish? And I could not decently make any objection, for it was mighty convenient to have a pretty cottage, ready furnished, in one of the finest suburbs of the city in which I was employed.
Mrs. Pinkerton was a good woman in her way: how could she be anything else and the mother of such an angel as I had secured for my wife? She meant well, of course; I admitted that, and I ought to be on the pleasantest terms with her, and determined from the first that I would be. But somehow we were not congenial, and when that is the case the best people in the world find it hard to get along agreeably together.