"Why will you insist on driving me into a corner?" she asks, with the accent of a person rendered irritable by pain. "Why will you force me to make admissions that I don't want to make? What is the good of my owning that I love you still, when I am determined never to marry you?"
"Never to marry me!" he repeats; unable, in his immense surprise, to do more than say her own words after her. A man is always overwhelmed with astonishment at the idea of any woman not being overjoyed to espouse him.
"Never to marry you!" she reiterates, steadily. "I was a bad-enough match for you before—without fortune, position, or connexion; people would have pitied you then for being drawn into such a marriage; but now——"
"But now, what?"
"But now that I am a companion," she continues, with a bitter pride—"an anomalous animal, just two shades higher than the lady's-maid in my own estimation, and probably not that in any one else's—a companion, too, of whom people can say the things that Miss Blessington will say of me now——"
"What do you mean? What sort of things can she say?"
But Esther maintains a shamed red silence.
"That you are completely passée?"
"No, not that!—that would not concern me much."
"That the way you cough in the evening fidgets her to death?"