"If it is your serious will," answered her mother, "it is in your power to-day to make all of us, and especially me, indescribably happy."
"Name it," cried Dorothea, "say what I am to do."
"If on this solemn day," proceeded the Baroness, "you would at last give your long-refused consent, if you would this day bless with your plighted word our friend Wallen, whom you yesterday mortified in so improper a manner."
Dorothea turned pale, and shrank back aghast. "Is this what you require?" said she faultering; "I thought on that subject I had once for all made my declaration."
"Your passionate mood," said the mother, "cannot pass for a rational resolution. You love no man, as you have often said, you scarcely know one whom you could esteem; this generous friend is devoted to you with a noble ardour, he proposes to you a lot, fairer than will ever again present itself to you, should you now reject it; you know the situation of your family, the critical state of our property; it is in your power to become the benefactress of your mother, the protectress of your sisters. Have you well reflected, my dear child, how cheerless your own future prospects will be, if you should persist in your obstinacy? Forsaken by men and women, in discord and enmity with your family, lonely and utterly lost in a cold, insulting world, poor and without succour! Will you not then review your youth with regret, and in bitter anguish repent, that you so wantonly, so thoughtlessly, rejected all happiness for yourself and your family? Does this generous man then require from you love and passion, as they are described in our perverse books? Does he wish for more than friendship and esteem? And can you refuse him this? He is ready for all sacrifices, which our pressing situation requires, and which his great wealth enables him to make. But if you treat him with such cold scorn, and he withdraws offended and affronted--who knows where your sisters or your mother, and you yourself, at some time or other in your old age, may be forced to beg a pitiful alms, where I may lay my head sick and helpless? and then will your weeping eye cast back a look of vain regret upon these days, which will be then for ever past."
"Say no more, my dearest mother!" cried Dorothea in the greatest distress. "Oh, unhappily, unhappily, the right is all on your side, and the wrong entirely on mine. No, I never yet loved, and never shall, my heart is locked against that feeling; the men, with whom I have been acquainted, inspire me all with a feeling of dislike, many with one of pity, not to say contempt. I perceive that a marriage founded on reason, which places us in a state or opulence and independence, must be a desirable thing; that it is in my power to make you and all of us happy by a single word, that it is certainly generous to speak it, that it is perhaps forced from me by necessity, by filial duty, and the noblest motives--and yet--why do my feelings shudder at it?--Ah, my dear mother, if it were not for just one thing,--may I say it? Will you not quite misunderstand me? O certainly! for I really do not understand myself."
"Speak, my beloved child," said her mother in the kindest tone, "I shall feel your heart, though I do not quite comprehend your words."
Dorothea hesitated, looked at her beseechingly, and said at last, in embarrassment, and with a beseeching voice: "Often have I put the question to myself, in hours of solitude I have earnestly examined myself, and then it appeared to me, as if I could join hands with the worthy man, whom you all, whom all the world respects, were he only not----"
"Well?" cried the mother.
"Were he only not pious," said the daughter hastily.