Margaret Maliphant

								

were all my friends alike, and I think there was not one of them
who would not have braved danger rather than I should come to harm,
although I do not suppose that I ever exchanged more than six words'
conversation with any of them in all my life. Words were not necessary
between us.
"Farmer Maliphant's little miss" had always been a favorite, and
"Farmer Maliphant's little miss" was always his youngest daughter. I
like to remember the title now; I like to remember that if Joyce was
mother's right hand in the house, I was father's companion in the
fields. I was very fond of father; I was very fond of any praise of
his. I did not get on so well with mother. I suppose daughters often do
not get on so well with their mothers. For though Joyce was a fresh,
neat, deft girl, just after mother's own heart, and I know that she
thought there was none to equal her, they never got on well together.
I was always fighting her battles. She was too gentle, or too proud--I
was never sure which--to fight them for herself. A cross word, only
spoken in the excitement of a domestic crisis--which meant worlds to a
woman to whom house-keeping was an art--would shut Joyce up in an armor
of reserve for days, and I often laughed at her even while I fought for
her.
As for me, I used to think I could manage mother. I wish I had the dear
old days back again! It's little managing I would care to do. It came
to very little good. I believe that every quarrel I had for Joyce only
did her harm with mother; I was such a headstrong girl that it took a
deal to set me down, and I am afraid that she got some of the thrusts
that were meant for me in consequence.
One of the special, though tacit, subjects of difference between
mother and myself was upon the choice of a husband for my sister. I
quite agreed with the country-folk, that she was not suited to be a
countryman's wife, but I did not agree with mother's idea of a suitable
husband for her.
Mother was a very ambitious woman. She wanted us to rise in the world;
she wanted us to hold once more something of the position she knew the
family had once held. She was not a highly educated woman herself, but
she was a shrewd woman. She had had us educated to the best of her
abilities, a little better than other farmers' daughters; if she had
had her way, she would have sent me, as the cleverer, to school in
London. But father would have none of it. He never denied her a whim
for herself, but he did not hold with boarding-school learning.
I was left to finish my education by living my life. But mother was
none the less ambitious for us, and being an old-fashioned woman, her
ambition aspired to good marriages for us. And I--foolish girl that I
was--chose to think that the particular man whom she hoped that Joyce's
beauty would secure was a very commonplace lover, and not at all worthy
of her. In the first place, he occupied a better position in the world