He assumed, and Mrs. Verners had fed that assumption, that there were to be no difficulties about Dorothy and, fundamentally, she meant to make none. She had looked away from Hepplestall when she met him on a road, and many times since then she had looked back in mind to Hepplestall, but Sir Harry was her fate and she did not quarrel with it. He had, though, been bearishly slow in accepting her as his fate and she saw no reason in that to smooth his passage to the end now that, clearly, he was in the mood to woo. His careless absence had been one long punishment for her: let her now see how he would take the short punishment of being impaled for a week or two on tenterhooks about her.
He came again, heralded by gifts, with hot ardor to his wooing. He brought passion and buttressed that with his self-knowledgeable desire to force the issue, to make a contract from which there could be no retreat: and thereby muddied pure element with lower motive. He complimented her upon a new gown.
“It pleases you?” she asked.
“Much less than the wearer.”
“You are a judge of ladies’ raiment, are you not, Sir Harry?”
“No more than becomes a man of taste.”
“One hears,” she said, “of Lady Betty Standish who was at choosing patterns with her dressmaker, and of a gentleman shown into the room that chose her patterns for her, and of the bills that Lady Betty sent to the gentleman, and of how he paid them.”
“You have heard of that?” he said. “Well, there are women in town capable of such bad taste as that.”
“The bad taste of allowing you to choose her gowns? But were you not competent to choose?”
“The bad taste,” he said, “of sending the bills to me. Would you have had me decline to pay them?”