“You!” he said. “My dear chap—they’d never look at you. Don’t you know they’re rolling in money and consider those girls Venuses? Why, they wouldn’t think me good enough, even if I were as steady as you are, if I didn’t own a place next door.”
“I know I’m a bad match. I know I’m not to ask her,” said Andy.
“Well,” said Stamford with slight alcoholic emotion, “we’ve been pals, you and I. I never thought you’d go and steal a march on me when my hands were tied and I couldn’t do anything.”
“I’ve—I’ve sort of half proposed,” said Andy, turning very red. “I must go on. She’ll think it so dishonourable if I don’t, whether she likes me or not.”
“Oh, very well,” said Stamford, rising and walking across the room to the whisky and soda. “You are perfectly within your right, of course.”
He jolted out a stiff glass and drank it off.
Andy’s thoughts ran round and round like a rat in a trap as he sat watching. Then something in the lad which underlay all his clerical affectations and easy immaturity rose up and made itself felt. It was that germ—that something—which has informed the saints of all creeds and all ages, and with which a very human, faulty man may be a saint, and without which no man can be.
“If you’ll—if you’ll keep clear of that—I’ll wait,” he said. “We’ll take an equal chance.”
“What business is it of yours whether I drink or not?” demanded Stamford violently—only he used other terms which it is unnecessary to repeat. “And you’d have no earthly chance with her, anyway.”
But certain unnoticed incidents were also crowding into his mind now, and he was sufficiently in love with Elizabeth to feel outraged at the thought of any other man proposing to her. He was more in love with her at that moment, as a matter of fact, than he ever had been before.