'Fitzjocelyn, I always knew how it would be if you took to being one of those very good people. Nothing is so weak, and yet so unmanageable. Any rational being would look on it as a duty to rescue her from such a man as that; but that is too ordinary a virtue for you. You must go higher.'
Louis made no answer. Never had his father pained him so much, and he could ill brook additional suffering.
'However,' said the Earl, recovering, 'I shall see her. I shall put the matter in a just light. She is a sensible girl, and will understand me when she has recovered the shock. On one head I shall give warning. She must choose between us and her father. If she persist in going out to join this establishment, I will have your engagement given up.'
'Father! father! you would not be so cruel!'
'I know what I am saying. Am I to allow you to be encumbered all the time she is on the other side of the world, waiting Ponsonby's pleasure, to come home at last, in ten or fifteen years' time, worried and fretted to death, like her poor mother? No, Louis, it must be now or never.'
'You are only saying what I would not hear from her. She has been insisting on breaking off, and all my hope was in you.'
'She has? That is like her! The only reasonable thing I have heard yet.'
'Then you will not help me? You, who I thought loved her like your own daughter, and wished for nothing so much!'
'So I might; but that is a different thing from allowing you to wear out your life in a hopeless engagement. If she cast off her family, nothing could be better, otherwise, I would never connect you with them.'
It did not occur to his lordship that he was straining pretty hard the filial duty of his own son, while he was arguing that Mary should snap asunder the same towards her father.