Page:Samantha on Children's Rights.djvu/225

 Sez I coolly, "I would choose a place with some other name."

"What do you mean?" sez she.

Sez I, "I would never choose a place called the Holy Heart for such a heartless affair as you are goin' into."

"Heartless?" sez she.

"Yes," sez I calmly, turnin' Josiah's second best vest over and attacktin' it on the other side (I wuz patchin' it), "under the shadow of the Holy Heart with His name printed above you you want to desecrate and ravage a heart, sell a heart. There wuz a time when your child's heart wuz a smooth, ontroubled place, a page with nothin' writ down on it but domestic names and attachments. Then wuz the time for you to have guarded that white, still place. If you hadn't wanted Tom Willis to write his name there on the virgin whiteness of that heart why did you let 'em be together day by day and year in and year out? You kep' still, readin' your dime novels and discoverin' your new diseases, of which I dare say you have a variety," sez I (for I see she looked mad), "you kep' still and never said a word of warnin' or command, or disapproval, left them two young hearts jest prepared for their images to be photographed on each other by the divine photography of the Sun of Love, and now when their images are stamped so full and onfadingly that no earthly hand can rub 'em out, now you complain of the imprudence of young people, the recklessness with which they form attachments and the wickedness of it.

"But, Tamer Ann Smith, I tell you now that what you call the imprudence and recklessness in not in Anna, but in her gardeens. Her gardeens that didn't watch her young heart, her young, careless, springlike, girlish life,