“You can’t have taken everything into consideration. Six people—six, all so different. If she has to get all their consents, she will never marry at all.”
“And no great harm done either,” said old Trevor briefly, “if that is all. Why should she marry? A woman who is poor, who wants somebody to work for her, that is comprehensible; but a woman with a lot of money, there is no reason why she shouldn’t stay as she is. What should she get married for?”
Ford scratched his head; he did not quite make it out. This was a challenge to all his convictions. It touched, he felt, the very first prerogative of man. Where were all true foundations of primal supremacy and authority to go to, if it were once set up as a rule that marriage was no longer necessary to womankind?
“It’s always a good thing for a woman to marry,” he said hoarsely. Many a radical opinion he had heard from his lodger, but never anything so sweeping as this.
“Ah! you think so,” said old Trevor. “There was poor Lucilla, to go no further. She might have been alive yet, and enjoying her good fortune, if she had not married me.”
This disturbed still more the man of orthodox ideas; he could do nothing but stare at the old revolutionary. What might he not say next?
“I suppose,” he said, after awhile, “poor Lucilla would never have hesitated; she was a woman who never considered her own comfort, in comparison with doing her duty.”
“Her duty, poor soul! how was it her duty to marry me? Poor thing, I’ve always been very sorry for her,” said Trevor. “Women have hard times in this world. But a girl with a great fortune, she may be kept out of it.” Here he paused, while his companion sat opposite to him, his very mouth open with amazement. It was indeed more than amazement, it was consternation which filled the honest mind of Richard Ford. He did not know what to think of this; was it a new phase of Radicalism worse than any that had gone before? He would have said it was Popery if he had not known how far from any ideas of that description his old friend was. While he sat thus half stupefied with astonishment, old Trevor took up his pen again hastily. “Now I think of it,” he said, “Lucy belongs to the country, I don’t hold much with the Church, but the Church should have a hand in it. I’ll add the rector to the committee. That will be only a proper respect.”
“The rector!” said Ford, pale with wonder, “and Mr. Williamson at the chapel, and Mr. Rushton, and Mrs. Stone, and me—”
“You forget Lady Randolph,” said old Trevor, with a chuckle; “that’s exactly as it ought to be, all classes represented, the right thing for a girl in Lucy’s position. To tell the truth,” he added, laying down his pen, “I don’t know that there ever was a girl in Lucy’s position before. It’s a very fine position, and I hope she’s been brought up to feel all the responsibilities. I don’t want to brag of myself; but given an unusual situation like hers, and I think I’ve hit the right thing for it. When you are born a great lady that’s different; but a girl with the greatest fortune in England, proceeding out of the lower classes—”