“Literally? But you wrote to me that you had engaged yourself to marry Mr. Holland?”
“And now I tell you by word of mouth that I have disengaged myself.”
“Good Heavens! You, I fancied, would be the last girl in the world to promise to marry a man and then back out of it.”
“That was what I myself fancied up till Monday last.”
“But how can you have changed your mind? Isn’t it very unfortunate—just when the man has become famous?”
“How could it be otherwise, Ella, when the man wrote so horrible a book as that?”
“Horrible? Is it horrible? I had no idea. I’m no judge of what is horrible in theology, or metaphysics, or whatever it is. But I do profess to know when a man has made a hit, whether in theology or anything else; and I perceive quite clearly that your Mr. Holland—well, not your Mr. Holland, has made a distinct hit. What sort of face is that you’re making at me? Oh, I see. It’s the face of the orthodox at the mention of something not quite orthodox. Pshut! don’t be a goose, Phyllis.”
“I don’t intend. Have I not told you that I’m not going to marry Mr. Holland?”
“That is like one of the phrases which you give to your father, so that the people might think him clever. Orthodox! Who cares nowadays for what is dully orthodox? Who ever heard of a hero in orthodoxy nowadays? The thing is impossible. There may be, of course, thousands of orthodox heroes, but one never hears anything of them. The planets Jupiter and Saturn and Mercury and Mars and the rest of them come and go at their appointed seasons, and no one ever gives them a second thought, poor old respectable things! but the moment a comet appears in the sky everyone rushes out to gaze at it, and the newspapers deal with it from day to day, and the illustrated papers give its portrait. Nothing could be more unorthodox than your comet. Oh, Phyllis, my child, don’t talk nowadays of orthodoxy or the other—what do they call it?—heterodoxy. Mr. Holland’s name will be in everyone’s mouth for the next year at least, and if his bishop or a friendly church warden prosecutes him, and the thing is worked up properly, he ought to be before the public for the next five years.”
“Oh, Ella!”