‘THE SORROWS OF WERTHER,’ replies my lady, as well as I could hear.
‘I think more of the sorrows of Sir Condy,’ says my master, joking like. ‘What news from Mount Juliet’s Town?’
‘No news,’ says she, ‘but the old story over again; my friends all reproaching me still for what I can’t help now.’
‘Is it for marrying me?’ said my master, still shaving. ‘What signifies, as you say, talking of that, when it can’t be help’d now?’
With that she heaved a great sigh that I heard plain enough in the passage.
‘And did not you use me basely, Sir Condy,’ says she, ‘not to tell me you were ruined before I married you?’
‘Tell you, my dear!’ said he. ‘Did you ever ask me one word about it. And had not your friends enough of your own, that were telling you nothing else from morning to night, if you’d have listened to them slanders?’
‘No slanders, nor are my friends slanderers; and I can’t bear to hear them treated with disrespect as I do,’ says my lady, and took out her pocket-handkerchief; ‘they are the best of friends, and if I had taken their advice—But my father was wrong to lock me up, I own. That was the only unkind thing I can charge him with; for if he had not locked me up, I should never have had a serious thought of running away as I did.’
‘Well, my dear,’ said my master, ‘don’t cry and make yourself uneasy about it now, when it’s all over, and you have the man of your own choice, in spite of ‘em all.’
‘I was too young, I know, to make a choice at the time you ran away with me, I’m sure,’ says my lady, and another sigh, which made my master, half-shaved as he was, turn round upon her in surprise.