“A woman who is such a fool as to marry ought to be unhappy,” she replied, with her eyes fixed upon Gabriel.
“A man who persuades her to do it ought to be taken out and hung,” answered he, with aphoristic gravity.
Fanny was perplexed.
“Better to be the slave of a parent than a husband,” she continued.
“I’d lock him out,” retorted Gabriel, with pure irrelevancy; “I’d scotch his sheets; I’d pour water in his boots; I’d sift sand in his hair-brush; I’d spatter vitriol on his shirts. A man who marries a woman deserves nothing better.”
He wagged his foot carelessly, took up one of the books upon the table, and looked into it indifferently. Fanny Newt turned to her sister, who sat smiling by her side.
“What is the matter with this man?” asked Mrs. Alfred Dinks, audibly, of May.
“There is a pregnant text, my dear Mrs. Dinks, née Newt, a name which I delight to pronounce,” said Gabriel, striking in before May could reply, with the lightest tone and the soberest face in the world, “which instructs us to answer a fool according to his folly.”
Fanny was really confounded. She had heard Abel in old days speak of Gabriel Bennet as a spooney—a saint in the milk—a goodsey, boodsey, booby—a sort of youth who would turn pale and be snuffed out by one of her glances. She found him incomprehensible. She owed him the first positive emotion of human interest she had known for years.
May Newt looked and listened without speaking. The soft light glimmered in her eyes, for she knew what it all meant. It meant precisely what her praises of Little Malacca meant. It meant that she and Gabriel loved each other.