“No, sir; your sister’s sneers, and the petty slights and persecutions for which I am indebted to her friend, Miss Sutherland, have not sufficient importance to affect me in any degree. 390 My decision is based upon the unfortunate fact that I do not love you.”
“No woman can withstand such devotion as I bring you, and time would soon soften and deepen your feelings.”
“Sir, you unduly flatter yourself. Neither time nor eternity would change me, and you would do well to remember that it is my voice, sir,—not my hand and heart,—that I offer for sale.”
“Your stubborn rejection is explicable only by the supposition that you have deceived me,—that you have already bartered away the heart I long to call my own.”
“I am a miller’s child,—you a millionaire, but permit me to remind you that I allow no imputation on my veracity. Why should I condescend to deceive you?”
She petulantly snatched her scarf from the fingers that still stroked it caressingly; but an instant later a singular change swept over her countenance, and pressing her hands to her heart, she said in a proud, almost exultant tone,—
“Although I deny your right to question me upon this subject, you are thoroughly welcome to know that I love one man so entirely, so deathlessly, that the bare thought of marrying any one else sickens my soul.”
Mr. Minge turned pale, and grasped the carved balustrade against which he rested.
“O Salome! you have trifled.”
“No, sir. Take that back. I never stoop to trifling; and the curse of my life has been my almost fatal earnestness of purpose. If I ever deliberated one moment concerning the expediency of clothing myself first with your aristocratic name, afterwards with satin, velvet, and diamonds,—if I ever silenced the outcry of my heart long enough to ask myself whether gilded misery was not the least torturing type of the epidemic wretchedness,—at least I kept my parley with Mammon to myself; and if you obstinately cherished hopes of final success, they sprang from your vanity, not my dissimulation. Mark you, I here set up no claim to sanctity,—for indeed my sins are ‘thick as leaves in Vallombrosa’; but my pedigree does not happen to link me with Sapphira, and deceit is not 391 charged to me in the real Doomsday Book. Theft would be more possible for me than falsehood, for while both are labelled ‘wicked,’ I could never dwarf and shrivel my soul by the cowardly process of mendacity. Mr. Minge, had I been a trifle less honest and true than I find myself, I might have impaired my self-respect by trifling.”