"You distress me by your opinion, I had hoped that to secure gratitude was the certain way to produce love."
"I apprehend that your ladyship will find it much more easy to deserve gratitude than to secure it; it is an intractable virtue, and favors which are supposed to have this return as their object, are apt to fail entirely in their purpose."
"I am very sorry you say so, Mr. Howard; I wish I could secure love from the objects of my affection. I fear the case is exactly the reverse."
The gentleman was silent, and a pause ensued between them, which the lady broke.
"What do you think of my daughter's marriage?"
"I think," replied he, "it has every promise of securing them mutual happiness—I hope this as sincerely as I wish it. Sir William is an excellent young man."
"The marriage is not so high a one as what my daughter might have aspired to—she has given up all dreams of ambition—do you not see that?"
"Of course Miss Osborne might have married the equal or the superior to her brother in rank," said Mr. Howard, "but she has acted far more wisely, in my opinion, in preferring worth and affection, though not accompanying so splendid an alliance as possibly her friends have expected for her. Sir William has wealth to satisfy a less reasonable woman than Lady Gordon, and if his rank is sufficiently elevated to content her, she can have no more to desire."
"Do not imagine, Mr. Howard, from what I said that I was regretting the difference in rank; on the contrary, I believe most fully that as she was attached to Sir William, Miss Osborne could do nothing better than marry him. Far be it from me to wish any one to sacrifice affection to ambition. Had there been even more difference in their rank, had the descent been decidedly greater—had he been of really plebeian origin, I should not have objected when her affections were fixed."
"I cannot imagine that there was any possibility of such an event; Miss Osborne would never have fixed her affections on an unsuitable object, as any one decidedly beneath her would have been."