"They will swear to me that you are charming; and then,—when my back is turned,—they'll pick you to pieces a little among themselves. I believe that is the way of the world, and I don't suppose that we are to do better than others."
"And if you had married an English girl, a Lady Augusta Somebody,—would they pick her to pieces?"
"I guess they would, as you say."
"Just the same?"
"I don't think anybody escapes, as far as I can see. But that won't prevent their becoming your bosom friends in a few weeks time."
"No one will say that you have been wrong to marry an American girl?"
"Now, Carry, what is the meaning of all this?"
"Do you know any man in your position who ever did marry an American girl;—any man of your rank in England?" Mr. Glascock began to think of the case, and could not at the moment remember any instance. "Charles, I do not think you ought to be the first."
"And yet somebody must be first, if the thing is ever to be done;—and I am too old to wait on the chance of being the second."
She felt that at the rate she was now progressing she would only run from one little suggestion to another, and that he, either wilfully or in sheer simplicity, would take such suggestions simply as jokes; and she was aware that she lacked the skill to bring the conversation round gradually to the point which she was bound to reach. She must make another dash, let it be ever so sudden. Her mode of doing so would be crude, ugly,—almost vulgar she feared; but she would attain her object and say what she had to say. When once she had warmed herself with the heat which argument would produce, then, she was pretty sure, she would find herself at least as strong as he. "I don't know that the thing ought to be done at all," she said. During the last moment or two he had put his arm round her waist; and she, not choosing to bid him desist from embracing her, but unwilling in her present mood to be embraced, got up and stood before him. "I have thought, and thought, and thought, and feel that it should not be done. In marriage, like should go to like." She despised herself for using Wallachia's words, but they fitted in so usefully, that she could not refrain from them. "I was wrong not to know it before, but it is better to know it now, than not to have known it till too late. Everything that I hear and see tells me that it would be so. If you were simply an Englishman, I would go anywhere with you; but I am not fit to be the wife of an English lord. The time would come when I should be a disgrace to you, and then I should die."