Hugh looked at her with his honest, trustworthy, brown eyes.
"Several times," he said. "But if I agreed, I shouldn't be worrying. Now another question: Do you think she will be happy?"
"Yes, up to her present capacity. If I did not think she would be happy, I would not bless it. Dear Edith, for example, thinks it is a shocking and terrible marriage. For her I daresay it would be, but then it isn't she whom Seymour proposed to marry. They would be a most remarkable couple, would they not? I think Edith would kill him, with the intention of committing suicide after, and then determine that there had been enough killing for one day. And the next day suicide would appear quite out of the question. So she would write a funeral march."
Dodo held the admirable sensible view that if discussion on a particular topic is hopeless, it is much better to abandon it, and talk as cheerfully as may be about something different. But this entertaining diversion altogether failed to divert Hugh.
"You said she would be happy up to her present capacity?" he reminded her.
"Yes: that is simple, is it not? We develop our capacity for happiness; and misery, also, develops as well. Whether Nadine's capacity will develop much, I cannot tell. If it does, she may not be happy up to it. But who knows? We cannot spend our lives in arranging for contingencies that may never take place, and changes in ourselves that may never occur."
Dodo looked in silence for a moment at his grave reliable face, and felt a sudden wonder at Nadine for having chosen as she had done. And yet her reason for rejecting this extremely satisfactory youth was sound enough, their intellectual levels were such miles apart. But Dodo, though she did not express her further thought, had it very distinct in her mind. "If she does develop emotionally like a woman," she said to herself, "there will not be a superfluity of happiness about. And she will look at you and wonder how she could have refused you."
But necessarily she did not say this, and Hugh got up.
"Well, then, at the risk of appearing a worse prig than John Sturgis," he said, "I may tell you that as long as Nadine is happy, the main object is accomplished. My own happiness consists so largely in the fact of hers. Dear me, I wonder you are not sick at my sententiousness. I am quite too noble to live, but I don't really want to die. Would it make Nadine happier if I told Seymour I should be a brother to him?"
Dodo laughed.