‘It was not, papa. I could swear there was no forethought. If there had been, she would have told me. She told me everything. She never loved Walpole; she could not love him. She was marrying him with a broken heart. It was not that she loved another, but she knew she could have loved another.’
‘Don’t talk such muddle to me,’ said he angrily. ‘You fancy life is to be all courting, but it isn’t. It’s house-rent, and butchers’ bills, and apothecaries, and the pipe water—it’s shoes, and schooling, and arrears of rent, and rheumatism, and flannel waistcoats, and toothache have a considerable space in Paradise!’ And there was a grim comicality in his utterance of the word.
‘She said no more than the truth of herself,’ broke in Kate. ‘With all her queenly ways, she could face poverty bravely—I know it.’
‘So you can—any of you, if a man’s making love to you. You care little enough what you eat, and not much more what you wear, if he tells you it becomes you; but that’s not the poverty that grinds and crushes. It’s what comes home in sickness; it’s what meets you in insolent letters, in threats of this or menaces of that. But what do you know about it, or why do I speak of it? She’s married a man that could be hanged if the law caught him, and for no other reason, that I see, than because he’s a felon.’
‘I don’t think you are fair to her, papa.’
‘Of course I’m not. Is it likely that at sixty I can be as great a fool as I was at sixteen?’
‘So that means that you once thought in the same way that she does?’
‘I didn’t say any such thing, miss,’ said he angrily. ‘Did you tell Miss Betty what’s happened us?’
‘I just broke it to her, papa, and she made me run away and read the note to you. Perhaps you’ll come and speak to her?’
‘I will,’ said he, rising and preparing to leave the room. ‘I’d rather hear I was a bankrupt this morning than that news!’ And he mounted the stairs, sighing heavily as he went.