“I know—I know.”
“‘Do you love that man, Miss West?’ she began, pointing to the paragraph.”
“Good gracious! That was a beginning—and a total stranger!”
“So I thought. Of course I became cold and dignified. ‘Have you not seen that I am going to marry Mr. Clifton?’ I asked in as chilling a voice as I could put on at a moment’s notice. ‘What I mean is this,’ said the young woman; ‘if you tell me that you are about to marry him because you love him, I will go away now and you will never hear anything of me again. But if you cannot say truly that you do love him I will tell you that the day you marry him I shall bring an action against him that will go far to ruin his career and to make you unhappy for the rest of your life unless you are very different from what I have heard you are, Miss West.’”
“Heavens!”
“I looked at her and saw that she was quite nice. ‘I cannot tell you that I love him,’ said I, ‘but I can tell you that I detest him, and that I love somebody else. Is that good enough for you to go on with?’ ‘Thank God!’ she cried quite fervently, and then she told me her story. Oh, there was nothing wicked in it. She is the daughter of a doctor in a town where he lived before he came to London. Her father was a man of influence in the town and Mr. Clifton became engaged to the girl—but in secret—no one was to know anything about it until he should find himself in a position to get her father’s consent.”
“A country doctor: Mr. Clifton must have been in a small way even then.”
“So he was—he hoped to better himself by marrying her, however. She showed me several letters that he had written to her—clever letters, but still such letters as would be received with laughter, in brackets, if read in a court of law. Well, he left that town and went to a larger, and having worked himself into a better position, he found that to marry the girl would be to marry beneath him—that was the girl’s phrase—‘to marry beneath him’—so he engaged himself—also in secret—to a girl above him in social position; but in the meantime he had worked himself up and up until he came to London and was a sufficiently important person to get me to engage myself to him—in secret too—and—that’s the whole story the young lady had to tell only—yes, I forgot: before he met her he had actually engaged himself to a girl in Lynnthorpe—a grocer’s daughter in the town—Miss Burden found that out also. Was there ever anything so amusing heard since the world began—such a comedy of courtships! He had been gradually working himself up through the whole gamut of the social scale until he reached the dizzy height represented by me—me! But there is a sublimer height even than me, and now he shall have his chance of reaching it.”
“And we have always thought him so clever!”
“So he is. But the cleverest men that have ever lived have had their weaknesses. His little weakness seems to have been the secret engagement. It appears that he has never been able to resist it. He has gone from one girl to another like a butterfly. He will marry the daughter of a Duke now.”