"Well! You take it very quietly. If you were going to make a good match I should be the first to rejoice; but they say that you are engaged to some niece of that odious, vulgar parvenu, Cashranger, the brewer; that little bold thing who wrote that play that made a noise a little while ago. Pray set me at rest at once, and say it is not true."
"I should be very sorry if it were not."
His sister looked at him in haughty horror. "Waldemar! you must be mad. If you were rich, it would be intolerable to stoop to such a connexion; but, laden with debts as you are, to disgrace the family with such——"
"Disgrace?" repeated Falkenstein, scornfully. "She would honor any family she entered."
"You talk like a boy of twenty," said Virginia, impatiently. "To load yourself with a penniless wife when you are on the brink of ruin—to introduce to us the niece of a low-bred, pushing plebeian—to give your name to a bold manœuvring girl, who has the impudence to take her stand before a crowded theatre——"
"Hold!" broke out Waldemar, fiercely: "you might thank Heaven, Virginia, if you were as frank-hearted and as free from guile as she is. She thinks no ill, and therefore she is not, like you fine ladies, on the constant qui vive lest it should be attributed to her. I have found at last a woman too generous to be mistrustful, too fond to wait for the world's advantages, and, moreover, untainted by the breath of your conventionalities, and pride, and cant."
Virginia threw back her head with a curl on her lip. "You are mad, as I said before. I suppose you do not expect me to countenance your infatuation?"
He shrugged his shoulder. "Really, whether you do or not is perfectly immaterial to me."
Virginia was silent, pale with anger, for they were all (pardonably enough) proud. She turned with a sneer to Josephine, a younger and less decided woman, just entering. "Josephine, you are come in time to be congratulated on your sister-in-law."
"Is it true?" murmured Josephine, aghast. "Oh! my dear Waldemar, pause; consider how dreadful for us—a person who is so horribly connected; the man's beer wagon is now standing at the door. Oh, do reflect—a girl, whose name is before the public——"