"It is what you call bad, I dare say."
"I don't think a tailor can be a gentleman."
"I don't know. Perhaps I wasn't a lady when I promised him. But I did promise. You can never know what he and his father did for us. I think we should have died only for them. You don't know how we lived;—in a little cottage, with hardly any money, with nobody to come near us but they. Everybody else thought that we were vile and wicked. It is true. But they always were good to us. Would not you have loved him?"
"I should have loved him in a kind of way."
"When one takes so much, one must give in return what one has to give," said Lady Anna.
"Do you love him still?"
"Of course I love him."
"And you wish to be his wife?"
"Sometimes I think I don't. It is not that I am ashamed for myself. What would it have signified if I had gone away with him straight from Cumberland, before I had ever seen my cousins? Supposing that mamma hadn't been the Countess—"
"But she is."