“You would find things very different if they were, I can tell you,” he said, with a snort.
“Oh, yes, very different. I would be free. I would take my own way. I would have nobody to tyrannize over me. Oh, uncle! forgive me! forgive me! I did not mean to say that! If you were poor, I would take care of you. I would remember you were next to my father, and I would do any thing you could say.”
He kept his eyes fixed on her as she stood thus, defiant yet compunctious, before him. “I don’t doubt for a moment you would do every thing that was most senseless and imprudent,” he said.
Then Lily dropped into her chair and cried a little—partly that she could not help it, partly that it was a weapon of war like another—and gained a little time. But Sir Robert was not moved by her crying; she had not, indeed, expected that he would be.
“I don’t see what all this has to do with it,” he said. “Consider this passage of arms over, and let us get to business, Lily. It was necessary there should be a flash in the pan to begin.”
Lily dried her eyes; she set her little mouth much as Sir Robert set his, and then said in a small voice: “I am quite ready, Uncle Robert,” looking not unlike the bust as she did so. He did not look at all like the bust, for there was a great deal of humor in his face. He thought he saw through all this little flash in the pan, and that it had been intended from the beginning as a preface of operations and by way of subduing him to her will. In all of which he was quite wrong.
“I am glad to hear it, Lily. Now I want you to be reasonable: the thunder is over and the air is clearer. You want to marry a man of whom I don’t approve.”
“One word,” she said with great dignity. “I am wanting to marry—nobody. There is plenty of time.”
“I accept the correction. You want to carry on a love affair which you prefer at this moment. It is more fun than marrying, and in that way you get all the advantages I can give you, and the advantage of a lover’s attentions into the bargain. I congratulate you, my dear, on making the best, as the preacher says, of both worlds.”
Lily flushed and clasped her hands together, and there came from her expanded nostrils what in Sir Robert’s case we have called a snort of passion. Lily’s nostrils were small and pretty and delicate. This was a puff of heated breath, and no more.