Vivian explained that he was not returning to Beckenhampton till the morrow: "I've business here; that's why I came up. No, I've nothing to do till eight o'clock—then I've got to see a man at the Eccentric." They descended the steps, and, after a furtive glance at his half-brother, he added deprecatingly: "It has been going on for an hour pretty nearly—you only heard the fag-end of it. I can tell you that what I've had to listen to would have tried the patience of a saint!" It embarrassed him to walk in the streets with David, and he signed to a passing hansom. "Where shall I tell him to drive? I'll come to your place with you if you like."
His contrition by no means abated his sense of being ill-used, nor did his indifference to his companion extend to his companion's disapproval. That David should be presuming to censure him was a situation not the less annoying because it seemed to him anomalous, and they were no sooner in the cab than he began vehemently to expatiate upon his grievance. David waited with rising eagerness for an opportunity to frame the question that again engrossed him.
"If I had guessed how she'd take the news, there'd have been none of this confounded row at all—I'd have left her in the dark. It's an encouraging thing, upon my soul it is, to be bullied when you make a confidant of your mother! What's it to do with her, anyhow? It won't cost her anything. How does it affect her if I marry? It's not as if I had to keep her—she's in no need of my assistance; I've never given her a pound in my life." He seemed to regard this as conclusive, and repeated it. "On my honour, I've never given her a pound in my life; she'd be every bit as well off if I were married, as she is now I'm single! There isn't a grain of logic in her objection; it isn't even as if I were living at home. Hang it, I scarcely ever see her! It's a regular dog-in-the-manger attitude she adopts—she hasn't got me herself, and she grudges me to anybody else."
"That isn't the way she looks at it," said David; "while you're single she feels she has still got you. Who is the girl?"
"She's beautiful—she's absolutely the most beautiful girl I ever met. She—she's the top stair of the highest flight of an artist's imagination. You should see the people turn round after her wherever she goes. And she's as clever as she's good-looking. I never believed I should meet a woman who'd understand me as she does. 'Jump at the first man who asks her'? Ha, ha! You can take your oath she's had proposals enough, young as she is.... I didn't come up with the intention of talking about it at all; it was the mater pumped me. I thought she was entering into it at the start—she was smiling, she seemed interested; I gave myself away before I dreamt she was going to make a fuss. Then it began. A bit of a sneer, a little ridicule, pretending it was all too silly to talk seriously about—after she'd led me on, after she'd made me think she was sympathising! Then when she saw that didn't work, she got nasty; she began to show her claws—I was a 'fool' in every other sentence. A man is the best judge of his own life; I know what I want, without anybody telling me. I'd have proposed long ago if I were sure it would be all right. I haven't much to offer, unfortunately. 'Throwing myself away'? I'm no catch for a girl like that. And then, of course ... I don't know; I think she does, but ... I can't swear she cares for me. Perhaps when it came to the point—she may only like me as a friend."
"What's her name?" said David. "How did you meet her?"
"I met her father first, and then he asked me up to the house. I'd seen her already then, or I daresay I shouldn't have gone. I might have missed everything if she hadn't been with him that afternoon. Funny, eh? Did it ever strike you how a fellow's life is often altered by things that don't seem anything at the time? I mean how the biggest things turn up from things that you'd think don't matter. There's a new idea for your poetry—you go in for original fancies like that, don't you? I read somewhere that your book's full of 'em. Her father is very amiable to me, but—he's not very wide awake—I don't think he sees how the land lies. He mayn't be keen on giving his daughter to me when I spring it on him, even if she accepts me. I wish she hadn't got a father. If she were on her own in the profession, the running would be easier for me; they marry in the profession on nothing—some of them—live in lodgings, and carry the babies down to the station on Sunday mornings. It's different with a girl like her. And the town is full of Johnnies who are in their governors' businesses and could offer her a decent home—a villa on the Hunby Road, and a couple of servants. It makes one a bit shaky about one's chances, you know."
The cab stopped before David could obtain the answer that he sought, and he opened the door with his latchkey, and led the way upstairs. His restlessness under the flood of discourse loosed upon him had heightened his misgiving. There had been nothing to justify his fear except enthusiasm—no word to suggest that it was Hilda who was referred to; he kept telling himself so. But, fluttering in his senses, there was a nervous, inexplicable conviction that it was Hilda. Reason could not still it. He even dreaded to repeat his question, feeling that with insistence the bolt would fall.
He took the whisky and a syphon out of the miniature sideboard, and called on the landing for tumblers. Vivian dropped into the armchair on the hearth.
"Yes, it doesn't make a fellow sanguine, to remember how much better she might do," he went on. "I don't mean that she's mercenary—nothing of the sort—but I daresay her family will be against it. Not that they're particularly well off themselves, as far as that goes—rather the reverse. Still, they have got a house. It's not being able to take a house that makes a fellow look so hard up. It doesn't show while he's single—I might have a thousand a year now, for all anybody can tell—but if I stop in diggings after I'm married, it'll be a different pair of shoes. There's no doubt that when a fellow marries, he advertises his position for all the world to see. I'm sick of diggings."