Ernest laughed heartily at this vehement and uncompromising sans-culottism. ‘You’re a vigorous convert, anyhow,’ he said, with some amusement; ‘I see you’ve profited by my instruction. You’ve put the question very plump and straightforward. But in practice it would be better, no doubt, gradually to educate out the landlords, rather than to dispossess them at one blow of what they honestly, though wrongly, imagine to be their own. Let all existing holders keep the land during their own lifetime and their heirs’, and resume it for the nation after their lives, allowing for the rights of all children born of marriages between people now living.’
‘Not at all,’ Hilda answered in a tone of supreme conviction. ‘I’m in favour of simply cutting our heads off once for all, and making our families pay all arrears of rent from the very beginning. That or nothing. Put the case another way. Suppose, Mr. Le Breton, there was somebody who had got a grant from a king a long time ago, allowing him to hang any three persons he chose annually. Well, suppose this person and his descendants went on for a great many generations extorting money out of other people by threatening to kill them and letting them off on payment of a ransom. Suppose, too, they always killed three a year, some time or other, pour encourager les autres—just to show that they really meant it. Well, then, if one day the people grew wise enough to inquire into the right of these licensed extortioners to their black mail, would you say, “Don’t deprive them of it too unexpectedly. Let them keep it during their own lifetime. Let their children hang three of us annually after them. But let us get rid of this fine old national custom in the third generation.” Would that be fair to the people who would be hanged for the sake of old prescription in the interval, do you think?’
Ernest laughed again at the serious sincerity with which she was ready to acquiesce in his economical heresies. ‘You’re quite right,’ he said: ‘the land is the people’s, and there’s no reason on earth why they should starve a minute longer in order to let Lord Connemara pay three thousand guineas for spurious copies of early Italian manuscripts. And yet it would be difficult to get most people to see it. I fancy, Lady Hilda, you must really be rather cleverer than most people.’
‘I score one,’ thought Hilda to herself, ‘and whatever happens, whether I marry a peer or a revolutionist, I certainly won’t marry a fool.’ ‘I’m glad you think so,’ she went on aloud, ‘because I know your opinion’s worth having. I should like to be clever, Mr. Le Breton, and I should like to know all about everything, but what chance has one at Dunbude? Do you know, till you came here, I never got any sensible conversation with anybody.’ And she sighed gently as she put her head on one side to take a good view of her sketchy little picture. Lady Hilda’s profile was certainly very handsome, and she showed it to excellent advantage when she put her head on one side. Ernest looked at her and thought so to himself; and Lady Hilda’s quick eye, glancing sideways for a second from the paper, noted immediately that he thought so.
‘Mr. Le Breton,’ she began again, more confidentially than ever, ‘one thing I’ve quite made up my mind to; I won’t be tied for life to a stick like Lord Connemara. In fact, I won’t marry a man in that position at all. I shall choose for myself, and marry a man for the worth that’s in him, I assure you it’s a positive fact, I’ve been proposed to by no fewer than six assorted Algies and Berties and Monties in a single season; besides which some of them follow me even down here to Dunbude. Papa and mamma are dreadfully angry because I won’t have any of them: but I won’t. I mean to wait, and marry whoever I choose, as soon as I find a man I can really love and honour.’
She paused and looked hard at Ernest. ‘I can’t speak much plainer than that,’ she thought to herself, ‘and really he must be stupider than the Algies and the Monties themselves if he doesn’t see I want him to propose to me. I suppose all women would say it’s awfully unwomanly of me to lead up to his cards in this way—throwing myself at his head they’d call it; but what does that matter? I WON’T marry a fool, and I WILL marry a man of some originality. That’s the only thing in the world worth troubling one’s head about. Why on earth doesn’t he take my hand, I wonder? What further can he be waiting for?’ Lady Hilda was perfectly accustomed to the usual preliminaries of a declaration, and only awaited Ernest’s first step to proceed in due order to the second. Strange to say, her heart was actually beating a little by anticipation. It never even occurred to her—the belle of three seasons—that possibly Ernest mightn’t wish to marry her. So she sat looking pensively at her picture, and sighed again quietly.
But Ernest, wholly unsuspicious, only answered, ‘You will do quite right, Lady Hilda, to marry the man of your own choice, irrespective of wealth or station.’
Hilda glanced up at him curiously, with a half-disdainful smile, and was just on the point of saying, ‘But suppose the man of my own choice won’t propose to me?’ However, as the words rose to her lips, she felt there was a point at which even she should yield to convention: and there were plenty of opportunities still before her, without displaying her whole hand too boldly and immediately. So she merely turned with another sigh, this time a genuine one, to her half-sketched outline. ‘I shall bring him round in time,’ she said to herself, blushing a little at her unexpected discomfiture. ‘I shall bring him round in time; I shall make him propose to me! I don’t care if I have to live in a lodging with him, and wash up my own tea-things; I shall marry him; that I’m resolved upon. He’s as mad as a March hare about his Communism and his theories and things; but I don’t care for that; I could live with him in comfort, and I couldn’t live in comfort with the Algies and Monties. In fact, I believe—in a sort of way—I believe I’m almost in love with him. I have a kind of jumpy feeling in my heart when I’m talking with him that I never feel when I’m talking with other young men, even the nicest of them. He’s not nice; he’s a bear; and yet, somehow, I should like to marry him.’
‘Mr. Le Breton,’ she said aloud, ‘the sun’s all wrong for sketching to-day, and besides it’s too chilly. I must run about a bit among the rocks.’ (‘At least I shall take his hand to help me,’ she thought, blushing.) ‘Come and walk with me? It’s no use trying to draw with one’s hands freezing.’ And she crumpled up the unfinished sketch hastily between her fingers. Ernest jumped up to follow her; and they spent the next hour scrambling up and down the Clatter, and talking on less dangerous subjects than Lady Hilda’s matrimonial aspirations.
‘Still I shall make him ask me yet,’ Lady Hilda thought to herself, as she parted from him to go up and dress for dinner. ‘I shall manage to marry him, somehow; or if I don’t marry him, at any rate I’ll marry somebody like him.’ For it was really the principle, not the person, that Lady Hilda specially insisted upon.