"Can you doubt, Caroline?" said Adela, and Miss Gauntlet's eyes shone as Caroline had never before seen them shine.
"Indeed, I do doubt; doubt very much. Not that I ought to doubt. What I knew to be wise a week ago, I know also to be wise now. But one is so weak, and it is so hard to refuse those whom we love."
"Hard, indeed!" said Adela. "To my thinking, a woman would have a stone instead of a heart who could refuse such a request as that from a man to whom she has confessed her love."
"But because you love a man, would you wish to make a beggar of him?"
"We are too much afraid of what we call beggary," said Adela. "Beggary, Caroline, with four hundred pounds a year! You had no right to accept a man if you intended to decline to live with him on such an income as that. He should make no request; it should come from him as a demand."
"A demand. No; his time for demands has not yet come."
"But it has come if you are true to your word. You should have thought of all this, and no doubt did think of it, before you accepted him. You have no right now to make him wretched."
"And, therefore, I will not make him poor."
"Poor, poor! How fearfully afraid we are of poverty! Is there nothing worse than poverty, what you call poverty—poverty that cannot have its gowns starched above once a week?" Caroline stared at her, but Adela went on. "Broken hearts are not half so bad as that; nor daily tears and disappointed hopes, nor dry, dull, dead, listless despondency without one drop of water to refresh it! All that is as nothing to a well-grounded apprehension as to one's larder! Never marry till you are sure that will be full, let the heart be ever so empty."
"Adela!"