How terrible to a woman to have the best she has to offer refused; but the girl bore up bravely.
“What is it?” she asked, without any particular interest.
I was doing some rapid thinking. An idea had come into my head which startled me. It was an inspiration, a solution of a pressing problem. Swiftly I decided.
“To do as you suggest,” I said, “would be very wrong, and what’s worse, it would be crudely conventional. It is commonplace now in some society to live with a person without marrying them; the original thing’s to marry them. Well, will you marry me?”
She looked at me incredulously. I went on calmly.
“But for me, as you say, your troubles would by now have been over. In a way I’m responsible for your life. What’s to be done? I’m not old enough to adopt you, and to constitute myself your guardian would lay me open to uncharitable suspicion. From now on I know I shall be infernally worried about you. Well, the easiest way out of the difficulty seems to be to marry you, doesn’t it?”
“But you don’t know me,” she gasped.
“You’ve got ‘nothing on me’ there,” I said airily; “you don’t know me. That’s precisely what makes it so interesting. Any man can marry a woman he knows; it takes an original to marry one he doesn’t. But after all, has not the method some merit? We start with no illusions. There will be no eye-opening process, no finding our swans geese. The beauty of such a marriage is that we don’t entirely ring down the curtain on romance.”
“But—I have no money.”
“Neither have I. What does that matter? Any fool can marry if he’s got money; it takes a brave man to do it if he’s broke.”