Mary paused with a little shudder, thinking of that honourable dew of labour which Scarfield had gently suggested might be washed off. It gave John the most curious, whimsical sensation of universal misunderstanding and general topsy-turvy to hear the girl's statement of that influence which his friends had been discussing with so much more exalted ideas of its power.
"But surely you could get him to wash?" he said, with a laugh.
"It ain't so easy as you think," said Mary. "When you're only keeping company they'll do it, and keep themselves tidy; but when they are married men!—then they think only of what's comfortable," the girl said, with a sigh. Her head inclined almost upon John's shoulder as she made her plaint, which was half ludicrous to him, not wholly touching as she hoped. "Oh, Mr Rushton, how can I ever make up my mind to such a fate?" Mary said.
"But, my little girl," he said, "you know there is always one way out of it. You needn't marry at all—at least, I mean just at present," he added, hastily.
"What, and 'ave mother nagging at me from morning to night?" said Mary, hastily; and then in a softened tone, "I'd wait—ah, for twenty years!—for one as I was really fond of," she said.
And then there was a pause, and they went on together arm in arm: and the silence thrilled with meaning to poor little Mary, and perhaps to the young man, too, half carried out by the tide with which he had been so long dallying, half upon the dry ground to which he held with a sort of desperation—"One foot on sea and one on shore." John was not of the kind of those who are "to one thing constant never": yet he felt very strongly the force of this statement of his position. He could not bear to break her poor little heart, to fling her off into the arms of the unwashed Jim; but what could he do? To marry the daughters of the masses was not perhaps the way in which Oxford men could best influence those masses for good—and yet why not so if all their theories were true? He did not speak, though it was he who ought to have spoken. It was she who, after that moment of thrilling suspense which again came to nothing, took the word.
"I've been brought up too particular," she said. "We shouldn't be perhaps when it's only to end in that. I've been brought up so that I'm only fit for another spear."
"And what sphere is that, Mary?" He was a little amused, but he did, there was no denying, press to his side a little slender hand that clung to his arm.
"Oh, Mr Rushton, what you said yourself that time. Don't you remember, just after you came up, you said, 'Would you like to marry a gentleman?'" She began to cry softly in the dark, clinging to him. "Oh, Mr Rushton, when you said that it was like opening the gate just a little bit—to see heaven!"
"Did it look like that?" he said; his voice trembled a little. "It would be a poor heaven, Mary. I fear it wouldn't be happy for you at all. Think! You would have to give up your own people—your mother and everything."