Selah looked at him angrily. ‘What fools you men are about such things!’ she said in a voice of utter scorn. ‘When do you suppose I ever learnt the drapery? Or who do you suppose would ever give me a place in a shop of that sort without having learnt the drapery? I dare say you think it takes ten years to make one of you fine gentlemen at college, with your Greek and your Latin, but that the drapery, or the millinery, or the confectionery, comes by nature! However, that’s not the question now. The question’s simply this—Herbert Walters, do you or don’t you mean to marry me?’
‘I must temporise,’ Herbert thought to himself, placidly. ‘This girl’s quite too unreservedly categorical! She eliminates modality with a vengeance!’ ‘Well, Selah,’ he said in his calmest and most deliberate manner, ‘we must take a great many points into consideration before deciding on that matter.’ And then he went on to tell her what seemed to him the pros and cons of an immediate marriage. Couldn’t she get a place meanwhile of some sort? Couldn’t she let him have time to look about him? Couldn’t she go back just for a few days to Hastings, until he could hear of something feasible for either of them? Selah interrupted him more than once with forcible interjectional observations such as ‘bosh!’ and ‘rubbish!’ and when he had finished she burst out once more into a long and voluble statement.
For more than an hour Herbert Le Breton and Selah Briggs fenced with one another, each after their own fashion, in the little fishy lodgings; and at every fresh thrust, Herbert parried so much the worse that at last Selah lost patience utterly, and rose in the end to the dignity of the situation. ‘Herbert Walters,’ she said, looking at him with unspeakable contempt, ‘I see through your flimsy excuses now, and I feel certain you don’t mean to marry me! You never did mean to marry me! You wanted to amuse yourself by making love to a poor girl in a country town, and now you’d like to throw her overboard and leave her alone to her own devices. I knew you meant that when you didn’t write to me; but I wouldn’t condemn you unheard; I gave you a chance to clear yourself. I see now you were trying to drop the acquaintance quietly, and make it seem as if I had backed out of it as well as you.’
Herbert felt the moment for breaking through all reserve had finally arrived. ‘You admirably interpret my motives in the matter, Selah,’ he said coldly. ‘I don’t think it would be just of me to interfere with your prospects in life any longer. I can’t say how long it may be before I am able to afford marriage; and, meanwhile, I’m preventing you from forming a natural alliance with some respectable and estimable young man in your own station. I should be sorry to stand in your way any further; but if I could offer you any small pecuniary assistance at any time, either now or hereafter, you know I’d be very happy indeed to do so, Selah.’
The angry girl turned upon him fiercely. ‘Selah!’ she cried in a tone of crushing contempt. ‘What do you mean by calling me Selah, sir? How dare you speak to me by my Christian name in the same breath you tell me you don’t mean to marry me? How dare you have the insolence and impertinence to offer me money! Never say another word to me as long as you live, Herbert Walters; and leave me now, for I don’t want to have anything more to say to you or your money for ever.’
Herbert took up his hat doubtfully. ‘Selah!—Selah!—Miss Briggs, I mean,’ he said, falteringly, for at that moment Selah’s face was terrible to look at. ‘I’m very sorry, I can assure you, that this interview—and our pleasant acquaintance—should unfortunately have had such a disagreeable termination. For my own part’—Herbert was always politic—‘I should have wished to part with you in no unfriendly spirit. I should have wished to learn your plans for the future, and to aid you in forming a suitable settlement in life hereafter. May I venture to ask, before I go, whether you mean to remain in London or to return to Hastings? As one who has been your sincere friend, I should at least like to know what are your movements for the immediate present. How long do you mean to stop here, and when you leave these rooms where do you think you will next go to?’—‘Confoundedly awkward,’ he thought to himself, ‘to have her prowling about and dogging one’s footsteps here in London.’
Selah read through his miserable transparent little pretences at once with a woman’s quick instinctive insight. ‘Ugh!’ she cried, pushing him away from her, figuratively, with a gesture of disgust, ‘do you think, you poor suspicious creature, I want to go spying you or following you all over London? Are you afraid, in your sordid little respectable way, that I’ll come up to Oxford to pry and peep into that snug comfortable fellowship of yours? Do you suppose I’m so much in love with you, Herbert Walters, that I can’t let you go without wanting to fawn upon you and run after you ever afterwards! Pah! you miserable, pitiable, contemptible cur and coward, are you afraid even of a woman! Go away, and don’t be frightened. I never want to see you or speak to you again as long as I live, you wretched, lying, shuffling hypocrite. I’d rather go back to my own people at Hastings a thousand times over than have anything more to do with you. They may be narrow-minded, and bigoted, and ignorant, and stupid, but at least they’re honest—they’re not liars and hypocrites. Go this minute, Herbert Walters, go away this minute, and don’t stand there fiddling and quivering with your hat like a whipped schoolboy, but go at once, and take my eternal loathing and contempt for a parting present with you!’
Herbert held the door gingerly ajar for half a second, trying to think of a neat and appropriate epigram, but at that particular moment, for the life of him, he couldn’t hit on one. So he closed the door after him quietly, and walking out alone into the street, immediately nailed a passing hansom. ‘I didn’t come out of that dilemma very creditably to myself, I must admit,’ he thought with a burning face, as he rolled along quickly in the hansom; ‘but anyhow, now I’m well out of it. The coast’s all clear at last for Ethel Faucit. It’s well to be off with the old love before you’re on with the new, as that horrid vulgar practical proverb justly though somewhat coarsely puts it. Still, she’s a perfectly magnificent creature, is Selah; and by Jove, when she got into that towering rage (and no wonder, for I won’t be unjust to her in that respect), her tone and attitude would have done credit to any theatre. I should think Mrs. Siddons must have looked like that, say as Constance. Poor girl, I’m really sorry for her; from the very bottom of my heart, I’m really sorry for her. If it rested with me alone, hang me if I don’t think I would positively have married her. But after all, the environment, you know, the environment is always too strong for us!’
Meanwhile, in the shabby lodgings near the Portobello Road, poor Selah, the excitement once over, was lying with her proud face buried in the pillows, and crying her very life out in great sobs of utter misery. The daydream of her whole existence was gone for ever: the bubble was burst; and nothing stood before her but a future of utter drudgery. ‘The brute, the cur, the mean wretch,’ she said aloud between her sobs; ‘and yet I loved him. How beautifully he talked, and how he made me love him. If it had only been a common everyday Methodist sweetheart, now! but Herbert Walters! Oh, God, how I hate him, and how I did love him!’
When Herbert reached his mother’s house in Epsilon Terrace, Lady Le Breton met him anxiously at the door. ‘Herbert,’ she said, almost weeping, ‘my dear boy, what on earth should I do if it were not for you! You’re the one comfort I have in all my children. Would you believe it—no, you won’t believe it—as I was walking back here this afternoon with Mrs. Faucit (Ethel’s aunt, of all people in the world), what do you think I saw, in our own main street, too, but a young man, decently dressed, in his shirt sleeves. No coat, I assure you, but only his shirt sleeves. Imagine my horror when he came up to us—Mrs. Faucit, too, you know—and said to me out loud, in the most unconcerned voice, “Well, mother!” I couldn’t believe my eyes. Herbert, but I solemnly declare to you it was positively Ronald! You really could have knocked me down with a feather. Disgraceful, wasn’t it, perfectly disgraceful!’