“I tell you what it is, Eva; I have no patience with you and your fancies. Mr. Plowden is a very respectable man; he is a clergyman, and well off, altogether quite the sort of man to marry. Ah, Ernest—I am sick of Ernest! If he wanted to marry you, he should not go shooting people, and then running off to South Africa. Don’t you be so silly as to pin your faith to a boy like that. He was all very well to flirt with while he was here; now he has made a fool of himself and gone, and there is an end of him.”
“But, Florence, I love Ernest. I think I love him more dearly every day, and I detest Mr. Plowden.”
“Very likely. I don’t ask you to love Mr. Plowden; I ask you to marry him. What have love and marriage got to do with each other, I should like to know? If people were always to marry the people they loved, things would soon get into a pretty mess. Look here, Eva, as you know I do not often obtrude myself or my own interests, but I think that I have a right to be considered a little in this matter. You have now got an opportunity of making a home for both of us. There is nothing against Mr. Plowden. Why should you not marry him as well as anybody else? Of course, if you choose to sacrifice your own ultimate happiness and the comfort of us both to a silly whim, I cannot prevent you; you are your own mistress. Only I beg you to disabuse your mind of the idea that you could not be happy with Mr. Plowden, because you happen to fancy yourself in love with Ernest. Why, in six months you will have forgotten all about him.”
“But I don’t want to forget about him.”
“I daresay not. That is your abominable egotism again. But whether you want to or not, you will. In a year or two, when you have your own interests and your children.”
“Florence, you may talk till midnight if you like; but, once and for all, I will not marry Mr. Plowden;” and she swept out of the room in her stately way.
Florence laughed softly to herself as she said after her:
“Oh yes, you will, Eva. I shall be pinning a bride’s veil on to that proud head of yours before you are six months older, my dear.”
Florence was quite right; it was only a question of time and cunningly applied pressure. Eva yielded at last.
But there is no need for us to follow the hateful story through its various stages. If by chance any of the readers of this history are curious about them, let them go and study from the life. Such cases exist around them, and, so far as the victims are concerned, there is a painful monotony in the development of their details and their conclusion.