And
so the Bells lived for ten years.
That Saratoga is a gay place in July, August, and September, the
world knows well enough. To girls who go there with trunks full of
muslin and crinoline, for whom a carriage and pair of horses is
always waiting immediately after dinner, whose fathers' pockets are
bursting with dollars, it is a very gay place. Dancing and
flirtations come as a matter of course, and matrimony follows after
with only too great rapidity. But the place was not very gay for
Hetta or Susan Bell.
In the first place the widow was a timid woman, and among other
fears feared greatly that she should be thought guilty of setting
traps for husbands. Poor mothers! how often are they charged with
this sin when their honest desires go no further than that their
bairns may be "respectit like the lave." And then she feared
flirtations; flirtations that should be that and nothing more,
flirtations that are so destructive of the heart's sweetest essence.
She feared love also, though she longed for that as well as feared
it;--for her girls, I mean; all such feelings for herself were long
laid under ground;--and then, like a timid creature as she was, she
had other indefinite fears, and among them a great fear that those
girls of hers would be left husbandless,--a phase of life which
after her twelve years of bliss she regarded as anything but
desirable.
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