With such beauty and such fine presence she ought to make a magnificent marriage.
I was free to take up Walter and Natalie again. After dinner I said to him, as we sat smoking: “Have you spoken to Natalie? What does she say? What date did you settle upon?”
He looked sheepishly from Burridge to Ridley, then appealingly at me. I laughed at this affectation of delicacy, but I humoured him by sending them away. “What date?” I repeated.
He twitched more than usual before he succeeded in saying: “She refuses to decide just yet.”
“Why?” I demanded.
“She says she doesn’t want to settle down so young.”
“Young!” I exclaimed. “Why, she’s twenty-one—out three seasons. What’s the matter with you, that you haven’t got her half frightened to death lest she’ll lose you?” With all he has to offer through being my son and my principal heir he ought to be able to settle the marriage on his own terms in every respect—and to keep the whip for ever afterward.
“I don’t know,” he replied; “she just won’t. I don’t think she cares much about—about the marriage.”
This was too feeble and foolish to answer. There isn’t a more sensible, better-brought-up girl in New York than Natalie. Her mother began training her in the cradle to look forward to being mistress of a great fortune. I knew she, and her mother and father too, had fixed on mine as the fortune as long ago as five years—she was only sixteen when I myself noted her making eyes at Jim and never losing a chance to ingratiate herself with me. Her temporising with Walter convinced me there was something wrong—and I suspected what. I went to see her, and got her to take a drive with me.
As my victoria entered the Park I began: “What’s the matter, Natalie? Why won’t you ‘name the day’? We’re old friends. You can talk to me as freely as to your own father.”