“My dear, your stepmother has just given me a commission to bring you over to their way of thinking. I am so loth to lose you that my heart takes your side: but, Effie——”
“To lose me!” she cried, flinging away the “rubbitch” altogether, and seizing his arm with both her hands. “Oh no, no, that can never be!”
“No, it will never be: and yet it will be as soon as you’re married: and there is a puzzle for you, my bonnie dear. The worst of it is that you will be quite content, and see that it is natural it should be so: but I will not be content. That is what people call the course of nature. But for all that, I am not going to plead for myself. Effie, the change has begun already. A little while ago, and there was no man in the world that had any right to interfere with your own wishes: but now you know the thing is done. It is as much done as if you had been married for years. You must now not think only of what pleases yourself, but of what pleases him.”
Effie was silent for some time, and went slowly along clinging to her uncle’s arm. At last she said in a low tone, “But he is pleased. He said he would try to please me; that was all that was said.”
Uncle John shook his head.
“That may be all that is said, and it is all a young man thinks when he is in love. But, my dear, that means that you must please him. Everything is reciprocal in this world. And the moment you give your consent that he is to please you, you pledge yourself to consider and please him.”
“But he is pleased. Oh! he says he will do whatever I wish.”
“That is if you will do what he wishes, Effie. For what he wishes is what it all means, my dear. And the moment you put your hand in his, it is right that he should strive to have you, and fight and struggle to have you, and never be content till he has got you. I would myself think him a poor creature if he thought anything else.”
There was another pause, and then Effie said, clasping more closely her uncle’s arm, “But it would be soon enough in a year or two—after there was time to think. Why should there be a hurry? After I am twenty I would have more sense; it would not be so hard. I could understand better. Surely that’s very reasonable, Uncle John.”
“Too reasonable,” he said, shaking his head. “Effie, lift up your eyes and look me in the face. Are you sure that you are happy, my little woman? Look me in the face.”