“I will let you love me as much as you please.”
“To love you as much as I please, would be to call you my own; to marry you; to say wife to you; to have you altogether, with nobody to come between, or try to stop my worshiping of you—not father, not mother—nobody!”
“Now you are foolish, Walter! You know I never meant that! You must have known that never could be! I never imagined you could make such a fantastic blunder! But then how should you know how we think about things! I must remember that, and not be hard upon you!”
“You mean that your father and mother would not like it?”
“There it is! You do not understand! I thought so! I do not mean my father and mother in particular; I mean our people—people of our position—I would say rank, but that might hurt you! We are brought up so differently from you, that you can not understand how we think of such things. It grieves me to appear unkind, but really, Walter! There is not a man I love more than you—but marriage! Lady Lufa would be in everybody’s mouth, the same as if I had run off with my groom! Our people are so blind that, believe me, they would hardly see the difference. The thing is simply impossible!”
“It would not be impossible if you loved me!”
“Then I don’t, never did, never could love you. Don’t imagine you can persuade me to anything unbecoming, anything treacherous to my people! You will find yourself awfully mistaken!”
“But I may make myself a name! If I were as famous as Lord Tennyson, would it be just as impossible?”
“To say it would not, would be to confess myself worldly, and that I never was! No, Walter; I admire you; if you could be trusted not to misunderstand, I might even say I loved you! I shall always be glad to see you, always enjoy hearing you read; but there is a line as impassable as the Persian river of death. Talk about something else, or I must go!”
Here Walter, who had been shivering with cold, began to grow warm again as he answered: