“I was equal, however, to the emergency; my desolate position, and my heavy mourning, the sorrow I have passed through, all combine to give me a courage I lacked in former times.
“Whilst he was still exalting himself and depreciating me—reciting the glories of the Glendares and contrasting the rank to which he could have raised me with the level of obscurity in which my refusal doomed me to remain for life, maundering on as one might have thought only an angry ill-bred woman or a spoiled child could have maundered—I rose and rang the bell.
“‘Perhaps you will go now, Mr. Somerford,’ I said, ruthlessly cutting across a sentence in which he was drawing a picture of my future life when married to a poor apothecary who had not even the recommendation of being possessed of all his senses. ‘Perhaps you will go now, and spare yourself the vexation of being asked to leave before a servant.’
“I never saw a man so taken by surprise. He got up, made me a low, mocking bow, and quitted the room without uttering another word.
“Next time he asks any one to marry him, he says, he will take care the lady is in his own rank of life.
“He had been gradually provoking me, so at that point I broke silence and suggested the advisability of his ascertaining at the same time whether her worldly means were as excellent as his own.
“You will blame me for this, of course; but if I had bitten back the words they would have choked me.
“There was a time when I could have married him, and probably repented doing so every hour of my after life. I told him this, and he pressed me much to say when my feelings underwent so great a change.
“‘On that day,’ I answered, ‘when you forced me to remark,—We had made you welcome at Bayview, and we now make you welcome to stay away.’
“It is only women with money, I fancy, who have to endure impertinence at the hands of their suitors. I suppose the fact is a feeling of tenderness for the beloved one mingles even with the bitterness of losing her; but the wildest fancy cannot suppose any feeling of tenderness towards a fortune that a man sees plainly can never be possessed by him.