"I didn't say I was proud of it. How you do take a fellow up. Yes, perhaps I have thought it once or twice. I don't want to make myself out what I'm not."
He was dead honest, she thought, but still wasn't quite sure that he was worthy of her dear Mollie; or even that he was enough in love with her to make it desirable that he should marry her. But Beatrix, innocent and childish as she was in many ways, had yet seen too much of the world not to have her ideas touched by the worldly aspects of marriage, for others, at least, if not for herself. Bertie Pemberton would be a very good 'match' for Mollie; and she knew already that Mollie 'liked' him, though she had no intention of telling him so.
"Will your people like your marrying Mollie—if you do?" she asked.
"Like it! Of course they'll like it They're devilish fond of her, the whole lot of them. Why shouldn't they like it?"
She didn't answer, and he repeated the question, "Why shouldn't they like it?"
"I thought perhaps they might want you to marry somebody with money, or something of that sort," she said, forced to answer, but feeling as if she had fixed herself with the unworthy ideas she had sought to find in him.
He added to her confusion by saying: "I shouldn't have thought that sort of thing would have come into your head. I suppose what you really mean is that there'd be an idea of my marrying out of my beat, so to speak, if I took Mollie."
"If you took Mollie!" she echoed, angry with herself and therefore more angry with him. "What a way to talk! I think Mollie's far too good for you. Too good in every way, and I mean that. It's only that I know how people of your sort do look at things—and because she lives in a little cottage and you in a— Oh, you make me angry."
He laughed at her. There was no doubt about his easy temper. "Look here," he said. "Let's get it straight. I'm not a snob, and my people aren't snobs. As for money—well, I suppose it's always useful, if it's there; but if it isn't—well, it's going to be all the more my show. There'll be enough to get along on. If I could have the luck to get that girl for my own, I should settle down here, and look after the place, and be as happy as a king. The old governor would like that, and so would the girls. And they'd all make a lot of her. Everybody about here who knows her likes her, and I should be as proud as Punch of her. You know what she's like yourself. There's nobody to beat her. She's a bit shy now, because she hasn't been about as much as people like you have; but I like her all the better for that. She's like something—I hope you won't laugh at me—it's like finding a jewel where you didn't expect it. She's never been touched—well, I suppose I mean she's unspotted by the world, as they read out in church the other day. I thought to myself, Yes, that's Mollie. She isn't like other girls one may have taken a fancy to at some time or another."
Beatrix liked him again now. They had reached the copse where the next draw would be made, and were standing in a corner at its edge. She stole a glance at him sitting easily on his tall horse and found him a proper sort of man, in spite of his lack of the finer qualities. Perhaps he did not lack them so much as his very ordinary speech and behaviour had seemed to indicate. She had pictured him taking a fancy to Mollie, and willing to gratify it in passing over the obvious differences between his situation in the world and hers. But his last speech had shown him to have found an added attraction in her not having been brought up in his world, and it did him credit, for it meant to him something good and quiet towards which his thoughts were turned, and not at all the unsuitability which many men of his sort would have seen in it.