“If I had been in any other position, the last thing I should have wished would be to marry. I think it a very repulsive institution.”
She said it with quiet conviction, and without the slightest suspicion of anything shocking, considering her present position, in the utterance. But it so completely tied her hearer’s tongue that she had to go on unhelped even by one of those half-doubtful yeses with which Edward had a trick of punctuating their talk.
“It was a far better provision than I had any right to expect, and it would free both of you from an incubus.”
The worldly wisdom of the first half of her sentence might have kept him still tongue-tied, but the uncertain voice and twitching lower lip that set off the last half drove him, as she knew it would, into speech. (“I must bring home to him what an orphan I am, but I must not cry yet.”) She winked away a real tear.
“Is it possible,” he said, holding back with difficulty, as she triumphantly and yet tremblingly saw, the expression of an emotion far deeper than she had any suspicion of having been able to evoke—“is it possible that you have run your head into the noose because you have fancied yourself an unwelcome visitor here? How have we shown it? By what shameful lapse from courtesy and hospitality in us have you gathered such an idea?”
She put up her hands over her ears, hands whose affecting black Suèdeness gave no hint of Toby’s diamonds.
“I will not let you say such things!” she said with something nearing a little cry; “you who have been so astonishingly good to me. Even when you made me feel a little out in the cold of late, I know it was because you thought I deserved it; you did it for my good; but”—dropping her large white eyelids and making them quiver a little—“though I am not very clever, I could not suppose that you kept me here because I was a pleasure to you.”
Her words, though soft as a baby-zephyr in their gentle implication that his coldness, his Pharisaic want of charity in interpreting her, his inability to see things from her poor little point of view, had driven her to her present precipice seemed to hit him a blow full in the chest.
“If what you have done is owing to an extraordinary misapprehension,” he said in a penetrating low voice, “it is not yet too late to——”
But she did not let him finish his sentence, breaking in in real panic. “Good heavens! how I have overdone it! He is quite capable of sacking my Toby under the impression that he is delivering me.”