Page:Dale - A Marriage Below Zero.djvu/12

6 she is thankful to me; she appreciates my efforts. Ah! it is good to be appreciated, sometimes.

'I really don't know what I should do without you, Elsie," she says, in an occasional outburst of good nature. "You are such a comfort to me; you make me feel as though I were your sister. Sometimes I think I am."

So you see that her affection for me is by no means maternal. I call her "mother" from force of habit, though, accustomed as I am to the word, it often sounds rather ludicrous in my ears.

Conventionality forbids me to use her Christian name. People have always had pronounced prejudices in favor of what they call filial respect, and a quarrel with conventionality is generally fatal, as I have learned. So we trot around to receptions, and kettledrums, and dinners and dances as mother and daughter. I would willingly pass for the former if it were possible to do so, but it is out of the question, unfortunately for dear mamma.

I shall never leave my mother. We shall continue our trot about the social world, until one of