“Because I’ll make him,” said Katharine, firmly. “I can do that for you, and if you torture your code of honour into fits you can’t make it tell you that a wife should not do that sort of thing for her husband. Can you?”
“I don’t know,” answered Ralston, smiling. “I’ve tried it myself often enough with the old gentleman. He says I’ve had two chances and have thrown them up, and that, after all, my mother and I have quite enough to live on comfortably, so he supposes that I don’t care for work. I told him that enough was not nearly so good as a feast. He laughed and said he knew that, but that people couldn’t stand feasting unless they worked hard. The last time I saw him, he offered to make Beman try me again. But I couldn’t stand that.”
“Of course not.”
“I can’t stand anything where I produce no effect, and am not to earn my living for ever so long. I wasn’t to have any salary at Beman’s for a year, you know, because I knew nothing about the work. And it was the same at the lawyer’s office—only much longer to wait. I could work at anything I understood, of course. But I suppose I do know precious little that’s of any use. It can’t be helped, now.”
“Yes, it can. But you see my plan. Uncle Robert will be so taken off his feet that he’ll find you something. Then the whole thing will be settled. It will probably be something in the West. Then we’ll declare ourselves. There’ll be one stupendous crash, and we shall disappear from the scene, leaving the family to like it or not, as they please. In the end they will like it. There would be no lies to act—at least, not after two or three days. It wouldn’t take longer than that to arrange things.”
“It all depends on uncle Robert, it seems to me,” said Ralston, doubtfully. “A runaway match would come to about the same thing in the end. I’ll do that, if you like.”
“I won’t. It must be done in my way, or not at all. If we ran away we should have to come back to see uncle Robert, and we should find him furious. He’d tell us to go back to our homes, separately, till we had enough to live on—or to go and live with your mother. I won’t do that either. She’s not able to support us both.”
“No—frankly, she’s not.”
“And uncle Robert would be angry, wouldn’t he? He has a fearful temper, you know.”
“Yes—he probably would be raging.”