"Let him, let him. I've the best prospects of any broker in New York, and I've already got enough money for us to live on comfortably."
"I gave my word openly, freely," answered the girl. "I wasn't in love with any one then and I liked him as well as any man I had ever met. Now that his father has died, my father is doubly set upon it. I simply must go through with it."
"And as your father sacrificed pretty much everything to build the family fortune, so you are going to sacrifice yourself to add position to it."
"Now that is unworthy of you," said the girl earnestly. "That motive may be my father's but it isn't mine."
"Forgive me," said the man, who knew that the girl spoke even less than the truth.
"I can understand how you feel because I feel desperate myself; but honor, devotion, obedience to a living man, promise to a dead man, his father, who was as fond of me as if I had already been his daughter, all constrain me."
"They don't constrain me," said the man desperately, coming to the opposite side of the big desk and smiting it heavily with his hand. "All that weighs nothing with me. I have a mind to pick you up now and carry you away bodily."
"I wish you could," responded the girl with so much honest simplicity that his heart leaped at the idea, "but you could never get further than the elevator, or, if you went down the stairs, than the street, because my honor would compel me to struggle and protest."
"You wouldn't do that."
"I would. I would have to. For if I didn't there would be no submitting to force majeure. No, my dear boy, it is quite hopeless."