“When I am gone, you wish to say, but that is a frail hope. I married when a child, and the difference between Irving and myself is so little.”
This vanity would have seemed out of character to one so full of haughty malice as the woman before me; but extreme vanity is more frequently found connected with bad qualities that with good ones, so it did not surprise me.
“But with your son some compromise may be effected. You would doubtless rather surrender the unentailed estates to him, than to one so hateful to your ladyship as I am?”
“That may be readily supposed?”
“Well, madam, to one or the other you must resign them; to me if you persist in useless and wicked resistance; to him, if—if”——
“Well, if what?”
“If by marriage with the person whom I shall select, he secures the rights which I claim to himself.”
“That is, if my son, like his uncle, will degrade himself with a gipsy stroller,” she replied, with insulting bitterness.
“Madam, this is base; that which I propose saves your son from degradation, does not impose it. It was not of myself I spoke!”
“Of whom, then? Is there another claimant?”