"Oh, there's nothing sporting in it," he threw off with a kind of serious carelessness. "I'm a man; that's all. As I look back over the past I seem to have been a doll."
I asked him what were his plans. He said he was going to apply to his cousin, Andrew Brew, of Boston, going on to tell me more about the Brews than I had ever heard. He was surprised that I knew nothing of the important house of Brew, Borrodaile & Co., of Boston, who did such an important business with England and Europe in general. I replied that in Canada all my connections had been with the law, and with Service people in England. I noticed, as I had noticed before in saying things like that, that, in common with most American business men, he looked on the Army and Navy as inferior occupations. There was no money in either. That in itself was sufficient to condemn them in the eyes of a gentleman.
I forgot to be nettled, as I sometimes had been, because of finding myself so deeply immersed in his interests. Up to that minute, too, I had had no idea that he had so much pride of birth. He talked of the Brews and the Brokenshires as if they had been Bourbons and Hohenzollerns, making me feel a veritable Libby Jaynes never to have heard of them. Of the Brews in particular he spoke with reverence. There had been Brews in Boston, he said, since the year one. Like all other American families, as I came to know later, they were descended from three brothers. In Norfolk and Suffolk they had been, so I guessed—though Hugh passed the subject over with some vagueness—of comparatively humble stock, but under the American flag they had acquired money, a quasi-nobility and coats of arms. To hear a man boasting, however modestly—and he was modest—of these respectable nobodies, who had simply earned money and saved it, made me blush inwardly in such a way that I vowed never to mention the Fighting Adares again.
I could do this with no diminution of my feeling for poor Hugh. His artless glory in a line of ancestry of which the fame had never gone beyond the shores of Massachusetts Bay was, after all, a harmless bit of vanity. It took nothing away from his kindness, his good intentions, or his solid worth. When he asked me how I should care to live in Boston I replied that I should like it very much. I had always heard of it as a pleasant city of English characteristics and affiliations.
Wherever he was, I told him, I should be at home—if I made up my mind to marry him.
"But you have made up your mind, haven't you?" he asked, anxiously.
I was obliged to reply with frankness, "Not quite, Hugh, because—"
"Then what's the use of my getting into this hole, if it isn't to be with you?"
"You mean by the hole the being, as you call it, out on your own? But I thought you did that to be a Socialist—and a man."
"I've done it because father won't let me marry you any other way."