It was not often that Edward Penton gave way to passion, and it was brutal, this that he said: but for the moment he had lost all control of himself.
She rose up hurriedly from her chair. “That was no true man!” she cried. “Supposing that the woman was a fool too, she used him only according to his folly to show how false he was.” She paused again, breathless, her heart beating with excitement and indignation. “I am not asking you for your inheritance: I came to ask you—whether an arrangement might be proposed to you which should be for your advantage as well as mine. Let us speak frankly, as you say. I am not a girl, to be driven away by an insult, which comes badly—oh, very badly!—from you, Edward. If I have wounded you, you have stung me, bitterly; so let us be quits.” She looked at him with a smile of pain. “You have hit hardest, after all; you ought to be pleased with that!”
“I beg your pardon, Alicia,” he said.
“Oh, it is not necessary. It was business, and not sentiment, that brought me here. And this is the brutal truth, Edward—like what you have just said to me. You are poor, and I am well off. Penton would be a millstone round your neck; you could not keep it up. Whereas to me it is my home—almost the thing I love best. Will you come to terms with us to set aside the entail and let me have my home? The terms shall be almost what you like. It can be done directly. It will be like realizing a fortune which may not be yours for years. I ask no gift. Do you think I am not as proud as you are? I would not ask you for a flower out of your garden, as you say, much less your property—your inheritance! Ah, your inheritance! which twenty years ago, when we used to be here together, was no more likely to be yours—! If we begin to talk of these things where shall we end, I wonder?” she added, with another pale and angry smile. “You understand now what I mean? And I have nothing more to say.”
“Wait a moment,” he said; “I am not sure that I do understand you now. It is not what I thought, apparently, and I beg your pardon. I thought it was something that would be between you and me. But if I hear right, it is a business transaction you propose—something to be done for an equivalent—a bargain—a sale and barter—a—”
“Yes, that is what I mean; perhaps my father was right, and the solicitors were the people to manage it, not you and me—”
“To manage it—or not to manage it, as may turn out. Yes, I think that would be the better way. These sort of people can say what they like to each other and it never hurts, whereas you and I—Are you really going? I hope you are very well wrapped up, for the night is cold. But for this little squabble, which is a pity, which never ought to have been—”
“I can not think, Edward, that it was my fault.”
“They say that ladies always think that,” he said with a smile, “otherwise this first visit after—how long is it?—went off fairly well, don’t you think? At forty-five, with a wife and children, a man is no longer ready to throw anything away; but otherwise when it comes to business—”
“I was very foolish not to let it be done in the formal way,” she said, with an uneasy blush and intolerable sense of the sarcasm in his tone. But she would not allow herself to remain under this disadvantage. “Shall I tell my father that you will receive his proposal and give it your consideration?”