"You'll see if I can't."
"If you choose to wait ten years, you may."
"I won't wait ten months, nor, if I can have my own way, ten weeks." What a pity that Mary could not have heard him. "Half the fellows in the army are married without anything beyond their pay; and I'm to be told that we can't get along with £300 a year? At any rate, we'll try."
"Marry in haste, and repent at leisure," said Uncle John.
"According to the doctrines that are going now-a-days," said the Captain, "it will be held soon that a gentleman can't marry unless he has got £3000 a year. It is the most heartless, damnable teaching that ever came up. It spoils the men, and makes women, when they do marry, expect ever so many things that they ought never to want."
"And you mean to teach them better, Walter?"
"I mean to act for myself, and not be frightened out of doing what I think right, because the world says this and that."
As he so spoke, the angry Captain got up to leave the room.
"All the same," rejoined the parson, firing the last shot; "I'd think twice about it, if I were you, before I married Mary Lowther."
"He's more of an ass, and twice as headstrong as I thought him," said Parson John to Miss Marrable the next day; "but still I don't think it will come to anything. As far as I can observe, three of these engagements are broken off for one that goes on. And when he comes to look at things he'll get tired of it. He's going up to London next week, and I shan't press him to come back. If he does come I can't help it. If I were you, I wouldn't ask him up the hill, and I should tell Miss Mary a bit of my mind pretty plainly."