“At all costs?” she echoed, and her lip took on a curl. “And you call this egotism by the name of love! No doubt you are right,” she continued with an irony that stung him, “for love it is—love of yourself.”
“And is not all love of another founded upon the love of self?” he asked her, startling her with a question that revealed to her clear-sighted mind a truth undreamed of. “When some day—please Heaven—I come to find favour in your eyes, and you come to love me, what will it mean but that you have come to find me necessary to yourself and to your happiness? Would you deny me now your love if you felt that you had need of mine? I love you because I love myself, you say. I grant it you. But you'll confess that if you do not love me yet, it is for the same reason, and that when you do come to love me the reason will be still the same.”
“You are very sure that I shall come to love you,” said she, shifting woman-like the ground of argument now that she found insecure the place on which at first she had taken her stand.
“Were I not, think you I should compel you to the church to-morrow?”
She trembled at his calm assurance. It was as if she almost feared that what he said might come to pass.
“Since you bear such faith in your heart,” said she, “were it not nobler, more generous, that you should set yourself to win me first and wed me afterwards?”
“It is the course I should, myself, prefer,” he answered quietly. “But it is a course denied me. I was viewed here with disfavour, almost denied your house. What chance had I whilst I might not come near you, whilst your mind was poisoned against me by the idle, vicious prattle that goes round and round the countryside, increasing ever in bulk from constant repetition?”
“Do you say that these tales are groundless?” she asked, with a sudden lifting of the eyes, a sudden keen eagerness that did not escape him.
“I would to God I could,” he cried, “since from your manner I see that would improve me in your sight. But there is just sufficient truth in them to forbid me, as I am, I hope, a gentleman, from giving them a full denial. Yet in what am I worse than my fellows? Are you of those who think a husband should come to them as one whose youth has been the youth of cloistered nun? Heaven knows, I am not one to draw parallels 'twixt myself and any other, yet you compel me. Whilst you deny me, you receive this fellow Blake—a London night-scourer, a broken gamester who has given his creditors leg-bail, and who woos you that with your fortune he may close the doors of the debtor's gaol that's open to receive him.”
“This is unworthy in you,” she exclaimed, her tone indignant—so indignant that he experienced his first pang of jealousy.