“If I know that beautiful girl, passionate as an Italian under her American self-control, it will be the blessed shock of an answered prayer. She prays nightly, never doubt it, that Heaven may manage for her just such a surprise.”
He was growing afraid of the calm common sense that tried to see the thing from every side and weight the merits 118of each person’s point of view. Feeling it intolerable to be refused, he suddenly appealed to her pity, away from her justice.
“Oh, Mrs. Hawthorne, life is so unkind, and to be always wise simply deadly! A few memories to treasure are all the good we finally have of our miserable days, and to catch at a moment of gold without care that it will have to be paid for is the only way to have in our hands in all our lives anything but copper and lead; yes, dull lead, common copper.” He covered his face and pressed his eyes, in a way he had when the world seemed too hopeless and baffling; then as suddenly straightened up, remarking more quietly, “The Fosses are too wise.”
“They have my sympathy, I must say, Mr. Fane,” Mrs. Hawthorne hurriedly defended herself against being moved. “I should be just as much afraid as they to have my daughter marry a foreigner.”
“Mrs. Hawthorne, you ought to be afraid to have your daughter marry anybody.” He gathered heat again and vehemence. “As regards Italians, we are all one mass of superstitions. We are always comparing our best with their bad. As a matter of truth, our best and their best and the best the world over are one as good as the other, and our worst can’t be exceeded by anything Italy can show. If you make the difficulty that we are different, our point of view different, I object that Brenda’s is not so different. The international marriages that turn out well make no noise, but there are plenty of them. I have seen any number in the ordinary middle classes. No, parents are twice as old as their children; that is the trouble and always will be. The older people by prudence secure a certain thing, but it’s not the thing youth wanted. The 119older see a certain thing as preferable, because they are old; but the young were right for themselves, for a time, at least, until they, too, grew old and saw a long peace and comfort as superior to a brief love and rapture. Brenda is not shallow or changeable; it may be her one chance of happiness that her parents in their anxious affection are trying to remove her from, and which she will cling to with every invisible fiber of her being until she conquers, or turns into a dismal old maid. Brenda is not like other girls. Love is serious to her. She never played with it as Leslie has always done, and as American girls do, yes, in Massachusetts and Virginia alike. She is an earnest, simple, sincere, constant nature, very much, in fact, like him.”
“You seem to like him. Is he such a fine man really?”
“I don’t know a finer, in his way.”
“Good looking?”
“Mrs. Hawthorne, what a frivolous question! But he is. He is one of the most completely handsome men I know. Rather short, that’s all.”
“Oh, what a pity!”