“You are within your rights, I know. But, oh! father, how can you stand out for paternal authority in the face of my most utter misery?”
“But, Inarime, this is what I cannot understand,” he protested, returning to their old footing of equality. “Why should the thought of this marriage—a wholly respectable alliance—irritate you and make you miserable?”
“It is not he!” she whispered, breathlessly.
“Fudge!”
“Father, will you at least try to face the situation with a woman’s mind and instinct. Believe me, it is no contemptible mind or instinct that makes us shrink from an abhorrent marriage. We may not have heads clear as yours, but our instincts are as finely responsive to the promptings of nature as a watch is delicately accurate in its measurements of time. Your brains may err and falsely interpret. Our hearts cannot, unless art interferes. I speak now of uneducated woman pitted against educated man. In these things he will have much to learn from her. We are limited in our nature, father, and that which you ask of me is impossible.”
“I will not hear it. Nothing is impossible when it simply depends on the good-will and common-sense of the person. It is my punishment for having brought you up as a boy. All my love and thought and care were for you, and this is my reward. You seek to disturb and thwart me on the very first occasion that brings our wills into collision. A growing child is like a peach, soft and bloomy to the touch, sweet to the taste, until you come to the heart, where you find bitterness and hardness. What can it matter whom you marry, when you cannot marry him?”
“Oh, it is easy enough for you to speak as a spectator. You will not be marrying the man, and it makes all the difference. The servitude, the loathing, the degradation will be mine to bear, and only a girl can feel that.”
“A girl! a woman! Will you not taunt me with your boast of nicer feeling. This Oïdas, on your own admission, was not specially distasteful to you.”
“That was when you had not proposed him for a husband.”
“Ouf! One notes the unreasonable sex in that retort. What has my simple proposal to do with the man. If he were a detestable fellow you would have hated him from the beginning. Nothing but the unconquerable passion for worrying and grieving and turning everybody topsy-turvy, that is born in every woman, would make my desire to marry you to him paint him to you in blacker colours.”