"Yes, if you please, sir, because. . . ."
I got no farther, for flinging down his razor my father rose in a towering rage.
"Are you mad? Has somebody been putting the evil eye on you? The greatest match this island has ever seen, and you say postpone—put it off, stop it, that's what you mean. Do you want to make a fool of a man? At the last moment, too. Just when there's nothing left but to go to the High Bailiff and the Church! . . . But I see—I see what it is. It's that young Conrad—he's been writing to you."
I tried to say no, but my father bore me down.
"Don't go to deny it, ma'am. He has been writing to every one—the Bishop, Father Dan, myself even. Denouncing the marriage if you plaze."
My father, in his great excitement, was breaking with withering scorn into his native speech.
"Aw yes, though, denouncing and damning it, they're telling me! Mighty neighbourly of him, I'm sure! Just a neighbour lad without a penny at his back to take all that throuble! If I had known he felt like that about it I might have axed his consent! The imperence, though! The imperence of sin! A father has no rights, it seems! A daughter is a separate being, and all to that! Well, well! Amazing thick, isn't it?"
He was walking up and down the room with his heavy tread, making the floor shake.
"Then that woman in Rome—I wouldn't trust but she has been putting notions into your head, too. All the new-fangled fooleries, I'll go bail. Women and men equal, not a ha'p'orth of difference between them! The blatherskites!"
I was silenced, and I must have covered my face and cried, for after a while my father softened, and touching my shoulder he asked me if a man of sixty-five was not likely to know better than a girl of nineteen what was good for her, and whether I supposed he had not satisfied himself that this marriage was a good thing for me and for him and for everybody.