“Ah, of course you don’t like it. That is, you like my interest—I don’t see how you can help liking that; but you don’t like my freedom. That’s natural enough; but, my dear young friend, I want only to help you. If a man had said to me—so many years ago—what I am saying to you, I should certainly also, at first, have thought him a great brute. But after a little, I should have been grateful—I should have felt that he was helping me.”
“You seem to have been very well able to help yourself,” said Stanmer. “You tell me you made your escape.”
“Yes, but it was at the cost of infinite perplexity—of what I may call keen suffering. I should like to save you all that.”
“I can only repeat—it is really very kind of you.”
“Don’t repeat it too often, or I shall begin to think you don’t mean it.”
“Well,” said Stanmer, “I think this, at any rate—that you take an extraordinary responsibility in trying to put a man out of conceit of a woman who, as he believes, may make him very happy.”
I grasped his arm, and we stopped, going on with our talk like a couple of Florentines.
“Do you wish to marry her?”
He looked away, without meeting my eyes. “It’s a great responsibility,” he repeated.
“Before Heaven,” I said, “I would have married the mother! You are exactly in my situation.”