“Sir Guy Marleswood is not a married man,” she said slowly. “At least, neither he nor I think so, which is what matters, after all. He divorced his wife five years ago. He has asked me to marry him.”
“Very well, darling. When he writes and asks the permission of your parents, we shall see. But a man of four- or five-and-thirty, who has led the sort of life that he has led, does not generally want to marry a little girl of nineteen, even though he may be dishonourable enough to play at making love to her.”
But this agreeable theory was shattered next day, when Sir Guy Marleswood wrote a formal statement of his position, and an almost equally formal request for his daughter’s hand in marriage, to Frederick Tregaskis. He also stated unemphatically that the following day would find him at Porthlew Railway Hotel.
Thereafter, Rosamund watched the storm break over the household with a strangely aching heart.
Bertha regarded Sir Guy as a married man, and said so staunchly. Frederick Tregaskis, whom Rosamund had never yet heard to agree with his wife, declined to view the question from an ethical standpoint, but declared Hazel too young to enter upon a marriage which would of necessity be regarded more or less dubiously by the world in general.
“Wait another five years,” he remarked grimly to his daughter, “and see if you can’t do better for yourself than a divorced baronet fifteen years older than yourself.”
“No,” said Hazel, her small face set like a flint. “He wants me to marry him now.”
“I dare say. And I want you to wait. I suppose you owe something to your father?”
“Yes,” she said, and began to cry. “But not everything in the world. I owe something to myself. It’s my life.”
It was the passionate cry for individualism that Rosamund had heard from Morris Severing.