‘She would be a very nasty girl if she did not,’ said Nita, with a heightened colour and flashing eyes, ‘when I should do all in my power to be kind to her.’
‘Oh, you would do all in your power to accomplish that? Then you would not mind if John got married?’
‘I should mind it very much if his wife were such an odious woman as you seem to think she would be. Stepping in and destroying——’
‘The friendship of a lifetime; breaking every social tie, and so on. Let us put it in another light. Suppose he married, and married some one of so generous a disposition as to wish him not to lose his sister——’
‘I should not call that generous, but merely decent and reasonable.’
‘Well, he marries this decent, reasonable woman, and then you marry. Do you think your husband would look upon John in the light of a brother?’
‘Mr. Wellfield, what strange questions you ask!’
‘Not at all. You would have to consider the subject when you married.’
‘But I am not going to be married. I know papa thinks I shall have to, but I don’t intend it at all.’
‘Intentions have less than nothing to do with such a matter. When you fall in love with some one, and he asks you to marry him, you will do so of course, since you are neither a nun, nor a lunatic, nor in any way a perverse or ill-conditioned person,’ he answered tranquilly, while Nita looked at him in startled amazement, her heart beating with the same strange sense of a thrilling new emotion as she had this morning experienced. In all their nineteen years of brother and sisterhood, John had never dared—was ‘dared’ the word to use? No—it had never occurred to John to speak to her in such a manner as did this man whom she had first met yesterday. Yet she did not feel resentment towards him, though she tried to think she did, and answered as if she did.