“There’s no use, Maubray, in a fellow’s resisting his destiny; and there’s an old saying, you know, about marriages being made in heaven. By Jove! when it comes to a certain point with a fellow, it’s all over; no good struggling, and he may as well accomplish his—his destiny—by Jove, with a good grace. And—and I know, Maubray, you’ll be glad to hear, and—and I really believe it’s the best, and wisest thing I could have done—don’t you think so?”
“I’m sure of that,” said William, in the same tone, with the same smile. “Everyone says it’s better to marry, when a fellow can afford it; but I did not think you had a notion; that is for ever so long; and then some great lady.”
“No more I had,” answered Trevor. “By Jove! a month ago you weren’t a more unlikely man; but how can I help it? You never were spooney on a girl in all your life, and of course you can’t tell; but you’ve no idea how impossible it is for a fellow, when once he comes to be really in—in love—to—to make himself happy, and be content to lose her. I can’t, I know.”
“No, of course,” answered William, with the same smile and an involuntary sigh.
“And then, you know, money and that sort of thing, it’s all very fine, all very good in a wife; but by Jove! there’s more than you think in—in fascination and beauty and manner, and that sort of thing. There’s Sir John Sludgeleigh—old family, capital fellow—he chose to marry a woman from some of those cotton mill places, with no end of money, and by Jove, I think he has been ashamed to show ever since; you never saw such a brute. He’s ashamed of her, and they say he’d give his right hand had he never set eyes on her. I can quite understand, of course, a fellow that has not a guinea left: but, by Jove, if you saw her, you could not conceive such a thing. And there’s old Lord Ricketts, he married quite a nobody. Sweetly pretty, to be sure, but out of a boarding school, and so clever, you know, but no money, and no family, and he so awfully dipt; and she set herself to work and looked after everything, awfully clever, and at this moment the estate does not owe a guinea, and she found it with a hundred and twenty thousand pounds mortgage over it; and when he married her everyone said it was all up, and his ruin certain, and by Jove it was that marriage that saved him.”
“Very curious!” said William, dismally.
“To be sure it is; there’s no subject, I tell you, there’s so much nonsense talked about as marriage: if a woman brings you a fortune or connexion, by Jove, she’ll make you pay for it. I could tell you half a dozen who have been simply ruined by making what all the world thought wonderfully good marriages.”
“I dare say,” said William, in a dream.
“And then about family and connexion, really the thing, when you examine it, there’s wonderfully little in it; the good blood of England isn’t in the peerage at all, it is really, as a rule, all in the landed gentry. Now, look at us, for example; I give you leave to search the peerage through, and you’ll not find four houses—I don’t speak of titles, but families—older than we. Except four, there is not one as old. And really, if people are nice, and quite well bred, what more do you want?”
“Oh, nothing,” sighed William.