“You have not heard me out: you don’t understand. Edward, I know the first effect must be painful, but every word you will listen to will lessen that impression. I am, if you will remember, a little older than you are.”
“We were born, I think, in the same year.”
“That makes a woman much older. I told you so when it meant more. And I am a woman, more feeble of constitution than you are—not likely to live so long.”
“On the contrary, if you will allow me to interrupt you; women, I believe, as a rule, are longer-lived than men.”
She drew back with a pained and irritated look. “You make me feel like a lawyer supporting a weak case. It was not in this way that I wanted to talk it over with you, Edward.”
“To talk over the sacrifice of everything I have ever looked to—my birthright, and the prospects of my children. This is rather a large affair to be talked over between you and me after five-o’clock tea, Alicia, over a dying fire.”
“Then,” she said, “it would have been better I had not meddled at all, as my father always said. He thought it should have been made a business proposal only, through a solicitor. But I—I, like a foolish woman—remembering that we had once been dear friends, and feeling that I had been guilty of neglect, and perhaps unkindness—I would not have anything said till I had come myself, till I had made my little overture of reconciliation, till I—”
“If there is to be frankness on one side there should be frankness on both. Till you had put forth the old influence, which once would have made me do anything—give up anything—to please you.”
“You said,” she cried, provoked and humiliated, “not five minutes since, though I did not wish it—never thought of it—that you were my faithful servant still!”
“Yes,” he said; “and do you know what I should like to do now? You have come to ask me for my inheritance as you might ask for a flower out of my garden—if there were any! I should like to fling you your Penton into your apron—into your face—and see you carry it off, and point at you, like—you were always fond of poetry, and you will remember—the fellow that jumped among the lions for a glove—only a glove: only his life, don’t you know!”