“Do you think,” said the Minor Canon indignantly, “even with the little you know of her, that she is a girl to calculate upon having a place secured to her, or upon anyone’s patronage?”
“Then she hopes for—something else; which is a great deal worse for her happiness,” said the Signor. Then there was a pause. They had reached Mr. Ashford’s door, but he did not ask his companion to go in. The Signor paused, but he had not ended what he had to say: “With the little I know of her”—he said—“do you know more?”
This was not an easy question to answer. He could not say, I have been watching her for weeks; I know almost all that can be found out; but, serious man as he was, Mr. Ashford was embarrassed. He cleared his throat, and indeed even went through a fit of coughing to gain time. “Her brother is my pupil,” he said at last, “and, unfortunately, he likes better to talk than to work. I have heard a great deal about her. I think I know enough to say that she would not hope—anything that she had not been wooed and persuaded to believe in——”
“Then you think—you really suppose—you are so credulous, so optimist, so romantic,” cried the Signor with a crescendo of tone and gesticulation—“you think that a man of the world, a man of society, with no money, would marry—for love?”
The musician broke into a short laugh. “You should have heard them,” he added after a dramatic pause, “this very day whispering, chuchotéing, in my room while she was singing—talking—oh, don’t you know what about? About girls who marry rich men while (they say) their hearts are breaking for poor ones—about women using the most shameless arts to entrap a rich man, and even playing devotion to a woman with money; and the only one to be really pitied of all is the poor fellow, who has followed his heart, who is poor, who lives at Kew, and has two babies in a perambulator. I laugh at him myself,” said the Signor—“the fool, to give up his club and society because he took it into his silly head to love!”
“Rossinetti,” said the Minor Canon, “I know there are quantities of these wretched stories about; but human nature is human nature, after all, not the pitiful thing they make it out. I don’t believe they are true.”
“What! after all the newspapers—the new branch of literature that has sprung from them?” cried the Signor. Then he paused again and subsided. “I am of your opinion,” he said. “The fire would come down from heaven if it was true; but they believe it: that is the curious thing. You and I, we are not in society; we are charitable; we say human nature never was so bad as that; but they believe it. Rollo Ridsdale would be ashamed to behave like a man, as you and I would feel ourselves forced to behave, as my boy John is burning to do.”
“You and I.” The Minor Canon scarcely knew how it was that he repeated these words; they caught his ear and dropped from his lips before he was aware.
The Signor looked at him with a smile which was half satire and a little bit sympathy. He said, “That is what you are coming to, Ashford. I see it in your eye.”