"Dolly?"
"Yes, my dear. It's a great venture; but if any woman can live happy with such a man, she can do so. She's troubled about her money;—that's all."
"Marry Mr. Prong! I suppose she may if she likes. Oh dear! I can't think I shall ever like him."
"I never spoke to him yet, so perhaps I oughtn't to say; but he doesn't look a nice man to my eyes. But what are looks, my dear? They're only skin deep; we ought all of us to remember that always, Rachel; they're only skin deep; and if, as she says, she only wants to work in the vineyard, she won't mind his being so short. I dare say he's honest;—at least I'm sure I hope he is."
"I should think he's honest, at any rate, or he wouldn't be what he is."
"There's some of them are so very fond of money;—that is, if all that we hear is true. Perhaps he mayn't care about it; let us hope that he doesn't; but if so he's a great exception. However, she means to have it tied up as close as possible, and I think she's right. Where would she be if he was to go away some fine morning and leave her? You see, he's got nobody belonging to him. I own I do like people who have got people belonging to them; you feel sure, in a sort of way, that they'll go on living in their own houses."
Rachel immediately reflected that Luke Rowan had people belonging to him,—very nice people,—and that everybody knew who he was and from whence he came.
"But she has quite made up her mind about it," continued Mrs. Ray; "and when I saw that I didn't say very much against it. What was the use? It isn't as though he wasn't quite respectable. He is a clergyman, you know, my dear, though he never was at any of the regular colleges; and he might be a bishop, just as much as if he had been; so they tell me. And I really don't think that she would ever have come back to the cottage,—not unless you had promised to have been ruled by her in everything."
"I certainly shouldn't have done that;" and Rachel, as she made this assurance with some little obstinacy in her voice, told herself that for the future she meant to be ruled by a very different person indeed.
"No, I suppose not; and I'm sure I shouldn't have asked you, because I think it isn't the thing, dragging people away out of their own parishes, here and there, to anybody's church. And I told her that though I would of course go and hear Mr. Prong now and then if she married him, I wouldn't leave Mr. Comfort, not as a regular thing. But she didn't seem to mind that now, much as she used always to be saying about it."