"I should not have met you—like this, Willie, if I had doubted your intention to marry me. White women, especially French women, are not like brown girls. They regard their—reputation. If you have been playing with me, I shall not meet you again—much though I love you."
Willatopy thoughtfully considered this new development. To him, her speech was just foolishness, but in his tolerant way he tried to understand it. In his own small world, wives were models of virtue, but girls—and widows—were not. Marie was making a fuss about something, though quite what it was he had no idea.
"One does not marry everybody," he said at last. He could think of no sentence more illuminating.
"I am not—everybody—or anybody," replied Marie with dignity. "I am a French lady, as good a lady as Madame Gilbert. When a man makes love, as you have done, to a French lady, she naturally thinks that he intends to marry her."
This was far over Willatopy's head. It is the woman who proposes marriage in the Straits, and the man who, after fall consideration, gives or withholds his assent. An amour, such as this one of his with Marie, had nothing to do with marriage as he understood it. A man married so that his wife might work for him. He could not picture the white Marie, in her pretty French clothes, working for him or anyone else. She was altogether charming to sport with, but as a wife quite inconceivable. He tried to explain his simple code to Marie. It was not easy, for neither of them had a full command of the English language. Their vocabularies were sufficient for everyday speech, or for love-making, but were incapable of expressing the deeper mysteries of social philosophy.
Marie gathered that Willatopy would not marry her because she could not work in his hut or in his plantation, and that he had no use for a wife who couldn't. If that was all——
"That is nothing," exclaimed she brightly. "That only means that we must not live in Tops Island. After we are married we will go to England where you will be a great Lord and I shall be a great Lady. I shall be Lady Topsham, and I will make Madame Gilbert crever with jealousy."
"But I am not going to England," observed Willatopy, stolidly. He had fully made up his mind not to marry Marie, and was quite capable of continuing his refusal indefinitely. If she turned from him in consequence, he would be grieved, but marry her he would not.
Rather bluntly, perhaps, he conveyed this determination to the perceptions of Marie Lambert.
Furious, she sprang up. Willatopy rose with her. She was about to rate him in voluble French when she remembered that he did not understand a dozen words of that beautiful language. And since she could not do justice to her emotions in English, she stood there gasping, tongue-tied.