‘And you really like him?’
‘I hope so, for evidently it must be on love we shall have to live, one half of our income being devoted to saddle-horses and the other to my toilet.’
‘How absurd you are!’
‘No, not I. It is Mr. Walpole himself, who, not trusting much to my skill at arithmetic, sketched out this schedule of expenditure; and then I bethought me how simple this man must deem me. It was a flattery that won me at once. Oh! Kate dearest, if you could understand the ecstasy of being thought, not a fool, but one easily duped, easily deceived!’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘It is this, then, that to have a man’s whole heart—whether it be worth the having is another and a different question—you must impress him with his immense superiority in everything—that he is not merely physically stronger than you, and bolder and more courageous, but that he is mentally more vigorous and more able, judges better, decides quicker, resolves more fully than you; and that, struggle how you will, you pass your life in eternally looking up to this wonderful god, who vouchsafes now and then to caress you, and even say tender things to you.’
‘Is it, Nina, that you have made a study of these things, or is all this mere imagination?’
‘Most innocent young lady! I no more dreamed of these things to apply to such men as your country furnishes—good, homely, commonplace creatures—than I should have thought of asking you to adopt French cookery to feed them. I spoke of such men as one meets in what I may call the real world: as for the others, if they feel life to be a stage, they are always going about in slipshod fashion, as if at rehearsal. Men like your brother and young O’Shea, for instance—tossed here and there by accidents, made one thing by a chance, and something else by a misfortune. Take my word for it, the events of life are very vulgar things; the passions and emotions they evoke, these constitute the high stimulants of existence, they make the gross jeu, which it is so exciting to play.’
‘I follow you with some difficulty; but I am rude enough to own I scarcely regret it.’
‘I know, I know all about that sweet innocence that fancies to ignore anything is to obliterate it; but it’s a fool’s paradise, after all, Kate. We are in the world, and we must accept it as it is made for us.’