It made her again look at him. “Where would you have been, my dear, if I hadn’t meddled with YOU?”
“Ah, that wasn’t meddling—I was your own. I was your own,” said the Colonel, “from the moment I didn’t object.”
“Well, these people won’t object. They are my own too—in the sense that I’m awfully fond of them. Also in the sense,” she continued, “that I think they’re not so very much less fond of me. Our relation, all round, exists—it’s a reality, and a very good one; we’re mixed up, so to speak, and it’s too late to change it. We must live IN it and with it. Therefore to see that Charlotte gets a good husband as soon as possible—that, as I say, will be one of my ways of living. It will cover,” she said with conviction, “all the ground.” And then as his own conviction appeared to continue as little to match: “The ground, I mean, of any nervousness I may ever feel. It will be in fact my duty and I shan’t rest till my duty’s performed.” She had arrived by this time at something like exaltation. “I shall give, for the next year or two if necessary, my life to it. I shall have done in that case what I can.”
He took it at last as it came. “You hold there’s no limit to what you ‘can’?”
“I don’t say there’s no limit, or anything of the sort. I say there are good chances—enough of them for hope. Why shouldn’t there be when a girl is, after all, all that she is?”
“By after ‘all’ you mean after she’s in love with somebody else?”
The Colonel put his question with a quietude doubtless designed to be fatal; but it scarcely pulled her up. “She’s not too much in love not herself to want to marry. She would now particularly like to.”
“Has she told you so?”
“Not yet. It’s too soon. But she will. Meanwhile, however, I don’t require the information. Her marrying will prove the truth.”
“And what truth?”