“Answer me, Mouse,” said Brancepeth, bringing his walk to an end immediately in front of her. “I want to know, you know. Shall we marry or not? Don’t beat about the bush. Say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”
She blew some perfumed smoke in the air, then, in a very chilly and cutting tone, replied:
“Most distinctly: no.”
“And why not?” said Brancepeth, feeling an irrational offence, although a moment before he had dreaded receiving an affirmative answer.
“My dear Harry, we are both as poor as church mice. If you can’t pay your own tailors how would you pay mine?”
“We should get along somehow.”
“Oh, thanks! I have had nearly ten years of ‘getting along somehow,’ and it is an extremely uncomfortable and crablike mode of moving. I hope to have no more of it. It takes it out of one. I shall marry again, of course. But I shall marry money.”
He, still standing in front of her, gazed down on her gloomily. Certainly he had been keenly and nervously apprehensive that she would expect to marry him—would insist on marrying him; but now that she so decidedly refused to do so the matter took another aspect in his eyes. A vague sullen sense of offended and repudiated ownership rose up in him; it is a sentiment extremely tenacious, unreasonable, and aggressive, whether it be agrarian or amorous. He did not say anything; words were not very abundant with him, but he continued to look down on her gloomily.
Marry money!
And the man with money would have all this charming fair beauty of hers, and would have Jack and the others in his nurseries: and he himself—where would he be? Done with; rubbed off the slate; struck out of the running; allowed to do a theatre with her now and then perhaps, and see Jack and the others on their ponies in the ride of a morning—where was the good of Cocky having died? He wished with all his soul that Cocky had not died. Things had been so comfortable with poor old Cocky.