"My darling!" he stammered out, "my darling!"
"I told grandmamma this morning," continued Bijou, "and I must confess that she was not delighted. She did all she could to make me change my mind."
"I can quite understand that."
"She thinks that it is mad, for you as well as for me, to marry when there is such disproportion of age; and then, she did not say so, but I could see that there was something troubling her, which troubles me too, though to a much less degree."
"And it is?"
"The disproportion in money matters. Yes—it appears that you are horribly rich. Grandmamma said so yesterday, when she told me that you had asked for my hand."
"What can it matter, Bijou, dear, whether I am a little more or less rich?"
"It matters a great deal, with grandmamma's ideas about things especially. Oh, it is not that she thinks it humiliating for me to be married without anything, for I have nothing, you know, in comparison with what you have! No, she looks upon marriage as a partnership, or exchange of what one has. 'Give me what you've got, and I'll give you what I've got,' as the country people here say. Well, you have your name, which is a good one, and your money, which makes you a very rich man; on my side, I have my name, which is rather a good one, too, and my youth, which certainly counts for something."
"Very well, then, and how can the disproportion of what we have make your grandmamma uneasy?"
"Well, it's like this, you know—grandmamma is very fond of me, and she thinks that, as I am thirty-eight years younger than you, you might die before me, and that, after living for years in very great luxury, after letting myself get accustomed to every comfort, which, up to the present, I have not had, I might suddenly find myself very poor and very wretched at an age when it would be too late to begin life over again, and so I should suffer very much on account of the bad habits I had contracted, and which I should not be able to drop—"