“Just what I say, Augustus; and I am not aware it is a speech that need excite either the amazement or the terror I see in your face at this moment.”
“I am amazed; and if I understand you aright, I have grounds to be shocked besides.”
“Upon my word,” said she, in a voice that trembled with passion, “I have reason to congratulate myself on the score of brotherly affection. Almost the last words Jack spoke to me at parting were, 'For God's sake, shake off that old scamp;' and now you—that hold a very different position amongst us—you, who will one day be the head of the family, deliberately tell me you are shocked at the prospect of my being allied to one of the first names in the peerage.”
“My dear Marion,” said he, tenderly, “it is not the name, it is not the rank I object to.”
“It is his fortune, then? I'm sure it can't be his abilities.”
“It is neither. It is simply that the man might be your grandfather.”
“Well, sir,” said she, drawing herself up, and assuming a manner of intense hauteur, “and if I,—I conclude I am the person most to be consulted,—if I do not regard this disparity of years as an insurmountable obstacle, by what right can one of my family presume to call it such?”
“My dear sister,” said he, “can you not imagine the right of a brother to consult for your happiness?”
“Happiness is a very large word. If it were for Nelly that you were interesting yourself, I 've no doubt your advice and counsel ought to have great weight; but I am not one of your love-in-a-cottage young ladies, Gusty. I am, I must own it, excessively worldly. Whatever happiness I could propose to myself in life is essentially united to a certain ambition. We have as many of the advantages of mere wealth as most people: as fine equipage, as many footmen, as good a cook, and as costly silver; and what do they do for us? They permit us simply to enter the lists with a set of people who have high-stepping horses and powdered lackeys like ourselves, but who are no more the world, no more society, than one of papa's Indiamen is a ship of the Royal Navy. Why do I say this to you, who were at Oxford, who saw it all—ay, and felt it all—in those fresh years of youth when these are sharp sufferings? You know well—you told me your griefs at the time—that you were in a set without being 'of it;' that the stamp of inequality was as indelibly fixed upon you as though you were a corporal and wore coarse cloth. Now, these things are hard to bear for a man; for a woman they are intolerable. She has not the hundred and one careers in life in which individual distinction can obliterate the claims of station. She has but one stage,—the salon; but, to her, this narrow world, soft-carpeted and damask-curtained, is a very universe, and without the recognized stamp of a certain rank in it, she is absolutely nothing.”
“And may not all these things be bought too dearly, Marion?”