“Now, there’s Jane Rose, or that handsome Eliza Layard,” went on the Colonel, taking no notice. “I have reason to know that you might have either of them for the asking, and they are both good women without a breath against them, and, what in the state of this property is not without importance, very well to do. Jane gets fifty thousand pounds down on the day of her marriage, and as much more, together with the place, upon old Lady Rose’s death; while Miss Layard—if she is not quite to the manner born—has the interest in that great colliery and a rather sickly brother. Lastly—and this is strange enough, considering how you treat them—they admire you, or at least Eliza does, for she told me she thought you the most interesting man she had ever met.”
“Did she indeed!” ejaculated Morris. “Why, I have only spoken three times to her during the last year.”
“No doubt, my dear boy, that is why she thinks you interesting. To her you are a mine of splendid possibilities. But I understand that you don’t like either of them.”
“No, not particularly—especially Eliza Layard, who isn’t a lady, and has a vicious temper—nor any young woman whom I have ever met.”
“Do you mean to tell me candidly, Morris, that at your age you detest women?”
“I don’t say that; I only say that I never met one to whom I felt much attracted, and that I have met a great many by whom I was repelled.”
“Decidedly, Morris, in you the strain of the ancestral fish is too predominant. It isn’t natural; it really isn’t. You ought to have been born three centuries ago, when the old monks lived here. You would have made a first-class abbot, and might have been canonised by now. Am I to understand, then, that you absolutely decline to marry?”
“No, father; I don’t want you to understand anything of the sort. If I could meet a lady whom I liked, and who wouldn’t expect too much, and who was foolish enough to wish to take me, of course I should marry her, as you are so bent upon it.”
“Well, Morris, and what sort of a woman would fulfil the conditions, to your notion?”
His son looked about him vaguely, as though he expected to find his ideal in some nook of the dim garden.