My opinion seemed to carry considerable weight with her. For a day or two after our somewhat sanguinary encounter, she was prone to start—even to jump slightly—when I addressed myself to her with unintentional directness. She soon got over that, however.
We were discussing Aline's unfortunate venture into the state of matrimony and I, feeling temporarily august and superior, managed to say the wrong thing and in doing so put myself in a position from which I could not recede without loss of dignity. If my memory serves me correctly I remarked, with some asperity, that marriages of that kind never turned out well for any one except the bridegroom.
She looked at me coldly. "I am afraid, Mr. Smart, that you have been putting some very bad notions into my daughter's head," she said.
"Bad notions?" I murmured.
"She has developed certain pronounced and rather extraordinary views concerning the nobility as the result of your—ah—argument, I may say."
"I'm very sorry. I know one or two exceedingly nice noblemen, and I've no doubt there are a great many more. She must have misunderstood me. I wasn't running down the nobility, Mrs. Titus. I was merely questioning the advisability of elevating it in the way we Americans sometimes do."
"You did not put it so adroitly in discussing the practice with Aline," she said quickly. "Granted that her own marriage was a mistake,—a dreadful mistake,—it does not follow that all international matches are failures. I would just as soon be unhappily married to a duke as to a dry-goods merchant, Mr. Smart."
"But not at the same price, Mrs. Titus," I remarked.
She smiled. "A husband is dear at any price."
"I shouldn't put it just that way," I protested. "A good American husband is a necessity, not a luxury."