“Since it is also to be yours, does not the question seem a trifle crude?”
“Your address is to be mine? What do you mean?”
“I trust that you are sufficiently old-fashioned to consent to share your husband’s home.”
“My husband’s home! Have you dared to tell the man to drive me to your house?”
“The notion’s this: that you will consent to accept the shelter of my roof while I rout out the Bishop, so that we may be married in the morning. It may seem to be pressing matters on a trifle hastily, to ask you to permit yourself to be ‘wooed and married and all’ inside of half-a-dozen hours. But I’ve a feeling strong upon me that this is a business which were well done if it were done quickly. If we delay there’ll be a hundred thousand reasons buzzing about our ears, to sting us as if they were mosquitoes. While, if we’re married, there’ll be no sting left in them. They’ll only buzz. And of that they’ll soon grow tired.”
“I believe that you’re stark mad. You’re worse than that wicked old man. And I thought you were a gentleman. Will you tell the coachman—at once!—to drive me straight home.”
“My dear lady, permit me to ask your name. It’s a disadvantage to a man not to know the name of the lady he’s about to marry.”
“I certainly will not tell you my name. Will you do as I ask you?”
“I am your devoted slave, only do not treat me with too much harshness. This is a critical moment in my life: my fate hangs in the balance. Let us approach the consideration of our respective destinies with dispassionate calmness, with open minds. Let us be careful to avoid anything which may have the appearance of heat.”
As I caught his eye, I was surer than ever that he was laughing at me. He might have been an altogether delightful individual—I am offering no suggestion that he was not; but his barefaced impudence and brazen audacity were beyond anything I had ever conceived as possible. I saw that I should find myself in a pretty position if I did not look out—and quickly too. I had had such a dry-as-dust existence; here was the promise of adventure, if you liked. And I do not mind owning that there flashed through my mind a wild idea of seeing the adventure to a finish, of trusting him, of allowing him to take the arbitrament of my fate in his two hands, if that avuncular Bishop could only be persuaded to prove amenable—of permitting him to marry me in the morning. What a courtship it would have been! and what a wedding! What a nine days’ wonder! What would the girls have said? and mamma? and the five—particularly Walter Hammond, when he learnt how somebody else had taken a leaf out of his very own book, and made the running with a vengeance? His sister’s face—what sort of an expression would have been on that when she learnt the use which had been made of her brougham?—and what kind of an opinion would she have had of me?