"Until she is of age, and her own mistress," replied Mallard, with quiet decision.
"Impossible! What need is there to wait all that time?"
"Why, there is this need, Elgar," returned the other, more vigorously than he had yet spoken. "There is need that you should prove to those who desire Miss Doran's welfare that you are something more than a young fellow fresh from a life of waste and idleness and everything that demonstrates or tends to untrustworthiness. It seems to me that a couple of years or so is not an over-long time for this, all things considered."
Elgar kept silent.
"You would have seen nothing objectionable in immediate marriage?" said Mallard.
"It is useless to pretend that I should."
"Not even from the point of view of Mrs. Lessingham and myself?"
"You yourself have never spoken plainly about such things in my hearing; but I find you in most things a man of your time. And it doesn't seem to me that Mrs. Lessingham is exactly conventional in her views."
"You imagine yourself worthy of such a wife at present?"
"Plainly, I do. It would be the merest hypocrisy if I said anything else. If Cecily loves me, my love for her is at least as strong. If we are equal in that, what else matters? I am not going to cry Peccavi about the past. I have lived, and you know what that means in my language. In what am I inferior as a man to Cecily as a woman? Would you have me snivel, and talk about my impurity and her angelic qualities? You know that you would despise me if I did—or any other man who used the same empty old phrases."