“Camelia, I am fond of you. I did wish best things for you. I did hope to see you somebody. You would have been. You can be. Sir Arthur will be on his knees before you if you lift a finger.”
“Oh! I hope not,” cried Camelia.
“You know it. You know it. Lady Elizabeth hasn’t a chance. She has become literary—is writing the life of her great-grandfather, deep in archives—that means hopelessness.—Camelia!” and Mrs. Fox-Darriel’s cry gathered from Camelia’s impassive smile a frenzied energy. “You are not—tell me you are not—going to marry that man—relapse into a country matron! He will swamp you. You have nothing in common. It is calf-love, pure and simple. I felt it all along; hoped he would see the incongruity of it—take your poor little cousin, who was cut out for submission and nurseries.”
“Oh, I don’t think a superfluity of either will be expected of me,” said Camelia, with a laugh really unkind.
“Oh, heavens! You are going to marry him?”
“Yes, immediately,” said Camelia, somewhat to her own surprise. She had not expected her rather indefinite views on this subject to crystallize so suddenly and so irrevocably. “Console yourself, Frances,” she added, really feeling some compunction before Mrs. Fox-Darriel’s tragic contemplation, “it won’t be my funeral. He dug me out, and I am going to dig him out. You may hear of me yet—as his wife.”
“Ah!” Mrs. Fox-Darriel had found the calm of her despair. “It is the same old story. His indifference has done it all. It may be brutal, but I must say it, you threw yourself at his head. The flattery at last penetrated his priggishness; Endymion stooped to Selena.”
Camelia’s serenity held good.
“You can’t make me angry. I like your disinterestedness, Frances. Let me thank you for Endymion; I am sure the simile would flatter his forty-five years.”
“And I came hoping——”