"He would not be half as nice if he had."
"My dear, you talk like a child. When people advance into middle life, mere lovemaking grows to be up-hill work. It would be grotesque, if it had not become too insipid for people to attempt keeping it up. The larger interests are needed to make middle life bearable. It is gratifying then to find that one has married a man of note--some one heard of everywhere, and spoken of by everybody. With your looks and accomplishments and prospects, there is no man you may not have the refusal of. How comfortable, when one grows elderly and uninteresting, to be wife of the chief-justice, or of a senator, and receive as much attention in old age as one has been accustomed to in youth! An ex-beauty poorly married is a disappointed and a discontented woman, let me tell you."
"Walter could go into politics if he liked; and if he ever does, he must rise to the top, he is so clever and well informed."
"Not he. He will never be more than he is now. He is too much of an Englishman, and too fixed in his notions, ever to catch the tone of his neighbours."
"He is a gentleman. Why should he take the tone of people less cultured than himself?"
"He won't. That's where the trouble is. And therefore his neighbours will never really like him. They will fancy he looks down on them. They will never send him to Parliament, mark my words, however hard he may try. If they elect him reeve of his township, or a school-trustee, it is the most they will ever do for him.
"Playing country gentleman does not answer, my dear. It has been often tried. I have seen so many half-pay officers and others buy land, and start as country gentlemen, and it always ended the same way. In a few years their ready money was spent, and they could not move away. Their farms were worse cultivated than their neighbours', and less productive; and their children, rough and unkempt, grew up neither one thing nor another--neither gentle nor simple--with the pretensions of a class which did not care to accept them, and without the industry and thrift to keep them up in the one into which they were sinking.
"Have nothing to do with the land in this country, my dear; or marry a greedy and hard-working clown at once. Your children, at least, may come to be somebody in that case, though you will lead a drudge's life yourself."
"I am ready to risk it, mother, however it may turn out. A crust in the woods with the man of my choice, rather than all the splendour you can mention, without him."
"You are infatuated! Reason is thrown away on you. I wonder at my own patience in attempting to argue with you so long. But at least you shall not ruin your life if I can help it. If you will not send away this pernicious young man, I must carry you away from him. He shall find that however his persecution may inconvenience us, it shall further his schemes not a jot.... You will pack up to-morrow, girls, first thing. Come down to breakfast in your travelling dresses. We leave by the first train tomorrow forenoon;" and so saying, she left the room.