“But it isn’t quite like—­” Rose hesitated.

“Like what?”

“It wouldn’t seem quite so much as if you had your own home, would it, as if—­” Rose hesitated again.

Sylvia interrupted her.  “A girl is a fool to get married if she’s got money enough to live on,” said she.

“Why, Aunt Sylvia, wouldn’t you have married Uncle Henry if you had had plenty of money?” asked the girl, exactly as Henry had done.

Sylvia colored faintly.  “That was a very different matter,” said she.

“But why?”

“Because it was,” said Sylvia, bringing up one of her impregnable ramparts against argument.

But the girl persisted.  “I don’t see why,” she said.

Sylvia colored again.  “Well, for one thing, your uncle Henry is one man in a thousand,” said she.  “I know every silly girl thinks she has found just that man, but it’s only once in a thousand times she does; and she’s mighty lucky if she don’t find out that the man in a thousand is another woman’s husband, when she gets her eyes open.  Then there’s another thing:  nothing has ever come betwixt us.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean we’ve had no family,” said Sylvia, firmly, although her color deepened.  “I know you think it’s awful for me to say such a thing, but look right up and down this street at the folks that got married about the same time Henry and I did.  How many of them that’s had families ’ain’t had reason to regret it?  I tell you what it is, child, girls don’t know everything.  It’s awful having children, and straining every nerve to bring them up right, and then to have them go off in six months in consumption, the way the Masons lost their three children, two boys and a girl.  Or to worry and fuss until you are worn to a shadow, the way Mrs. George Emerson has over her son, and then have him take to drink.  There wasn’t any consumption in the Mason family on either side in a straight line, but the three children all went with it.  And there ain’t any drink in the Emerson family, on her side or his, all as straight as a string, but Mrs. Everson was a Weaver, and she had a great-uncle who drank himself to death.  I don’t believe there’s a family anywhere around that hasn’t got some dreadful thing in it to leak out, when you don’t expect it, in children.  Sometimes it only leaks in a straight line, and sometimes it leaks sidewise.  You never know.  Now here’s my family.  I was a White, you know, like your aunt Abrahama.  There’s consumption in our family, the worst kind.  I never had any doubt but what Henry and I would have lost our children, if we’d had any.”

“But you didn’t have any,” said Rose, in a curiously naive and hopeful tone.

“We are the only ones of all that got married about the time we did who didn’t have any,” said Sylvia, in her conclusive tone.

“But, Aunt Sylvia,” said Rose, “you wouldn’t stop everybody’s getting married?  Why, there wouldn’t be any people in the world in a short time.”