The re-opening of the subject devolved upon Mr Morgan. After the lapse of six weeks a letter arrived, reminding her of her promise to write to him, urging his love upon her, and hoping that she had reconsidered her decision. It was a restrained and kindly letter, with not one sentence in the whole of it into which she could read a hint at reproach. Quite at the finish he wrote:
“My mother sends her love, and wishes me to say that, as possibly you would be happier keeping house alone, she will find a home for herself near ours.”
A flush came into Prudence’s face while she read these words. She smiled ruefully, and laid the letter aside, and sat quite still, looking out at the sunlight with a shadow of doubt like a passing cloud darkening the blue of her eyes.
“That knocks down all my defences,” she mused, and moved suddenly and found her handkerchief and buried her face in it. “I’m a fool to cry,” she reflected. “It doesn’t alter anything really... But I wish she hadn’t sent that message.”
Thus ended Prudence’s fight for freedom. She gave in weakly, without further struggle; her resolves borne down by the relentless opposition of the family, by Mr Morgan’s quite courteous persistence, and by his mother’s unexpected concession. She no longer had any substantial reason to urge against the marriage. The reason which she had put forward repeatedly, that she did not love the man she was being forced to marry, was treated as frivolous and generally disregarded. There appeared no way of escape.
Marriage, which once had seemed to her to offer freedom from the dull restrictions of her home life, was nothing more than a shuffling of the same pack of cards. She would change her place in the game, that was all; leave one control for another. Perhaps that was life—woman’s life, anyway. But she had dreamed once of fine things, big things, in a world that was fair and lovely and tolerant—the land of promise of every young imaginative mind.
Chapter Thirty One.
Having yielded on the most important point. Prudence conceded every other. She no longer seemed to possess any will, or, if the will were there, she had no heart to express her wishes. The family arranged everything without consulting her; and the marriage, which was hurried forward to fit in as nearly as possible with the date previously fixed upon, was the biggest and most important function of its kind that Wortheton had ever seen.