“Gracious goodness, no! For what sort of sneak do you take me? She made a mistake, but any innocent young creature might do that. It’s whether it strikes you I should be justified in throwing THEM over.”
“It depends upon the sense you attach to justification.”
“I mean should I be miserably unhappy? Would it be in their power to make me so?”
“To try—certainly, if they’re capable of anything so nasty. The only fair play for them is to let you alone,” Waterlow wound up.
“Ah, they won’t do that—they like me too much!” Gaston ingenuously cried.
“It’s an odd way of liking! The best way to show their love will be to let you marry where your affections, and so many other charming things, are involved.”
“Certainly—only they question the charming things. They feel she represents, poor little dear, such dangers, such vulgarities, such possibilities of doing other dreadful things, that it’s upon THEM—I mean on those things—my happiness would be shattered.”
“Well,” the elder man rather dryly said, “if you yourself have no secrets for persuading them of the contrary I’m afraid I can’t teach you one.”
“Yes, I ought to do it myself,” Gaston allowed in the candour of his meditations. Then he went on in his torment of hesitation: “They never believed in her from the first. My father was perfectly definite about it. At heart they never accepted her; they only pretended to do so because I guaranteed her INSTINCTS—that’s what I did, heaven help me! and that she was incapable of doing a thing that could ever displease them. Then no sooner was my back turned than she perpetrated that!”
“That was your folly,” Waterlow remarked, painting away.