"But isn't it disgusting, that in your native land, you can never make anything go to your liking?"
This was very difficult for me to answer. I could not get along for a thousand wicked reasons—Free-trade, Democracy, adulteration, sewage-butter, foot-and-mouth complaint, living wage for men who have no life, and all the other wrong end of the stick we get.
"What I mean has nothing to do with your ideas," he continued as if all my ideas must be wrong, just when I was hoping that he began to see the right; "for Constitutional questions, I don't care twopence. It has become a race of roguery between both sides. Don't look savage, George, you know it as well as I do. Your party would do anything to get into power again. When the bone is in their own mouths, will they even try to crack it? But I have not come to talk all that stuff. I am under your directions in a matter nearer home. Are you going to play fast and loose with me, while your sister is being truckled away to an idiot of an Earl?"
If my mind had not been very equable and just, I must have had a quarrel with him over this. And if he had looked at me with any defiance—but his gaze was very sorrowful, as if all his hopes were blasted.
"Jackson," I answered in a rather solemn voice, having sense of my own tribulation, and I saw that he liked me to address him thus, though the name is not purely romantic, "you are not a bit worse off than any other fellow. Do you suppose that nobody has ever been in love before? You look at things from such a narrow point of view. Consider how much worse it must be for a woman."
"Well, I wish it was." His reply upset my arguments; I found it very difficult to re-arrange them on that basis.
"So far as that goes, I can get on well enough," he proceeded as I looked at him sensibly; "I shall feel it for years, no doubt, but still—but still the blackness and the bitterness of it is this, that such a girl, such a girl as never before trod the face of the earth, or inhaled the light of the sun—" "Don't get mixed," I implored, but he regarded me with scorn—"should be sold, I say sold, like a lamb in the market, to an idiot, just because he has a title!"
"You will be sorry when you have offended me," I spoke with extraordinary self-control, taking a side glance at my own case; "for I don't come round in a hurry, I can tell you. But you really don't know what you are talking of. My father and mother have heard of no proposal, neither have I. And as for Grace herself, she despises that milksop as heartily as I do."
"George Cranleigh, I have not known you long; but this I can say without hesitation, and I should like to see any man deny it, you are the very noblest fellow that ever—"