She did not answer. She rose to her feet.
“Is there any one else?” he repeated, a new note in his voice. He moved forward a step.
“You have no right to ask that,” she said.
“I have every right,” he replied. “What?” he continued, moving still nearer to her, his whole bearing changed in a moment by the sting of jealousy. “I am condemned, I am rejected, and I am not to ask why?”
“No,” she said.
“But I do ask!” he retorted with a passion which surprised and alarmed her; he was no longer the despondent lover of five minutes before, but a man demanding his rights. “Have you no heart? Have you no feeling for me? Do you not consider what this is to me?”
“I consider,” Mary replied with a warmth almost equal to his own, “that if I answered your question I should humiliate myself. No one, no one has a right, sir, to ask that question. And least of all you!”
“And I am to be cast aside, I am to be discarded without a reason?”
That word “discarded” seemed so unjust, and so uncalled for, seeing that she had given him no encouragement, that it stung her to anger. “Without a reason?” she retorted. “I have given you a reason—I do not return your love. That is the only reason that you have a right to know. But if you press me, I will tell you why what you propose is impossible. Because, if I ever love a man I hope, Mr. Basset, that it will be one who has some work in the world, something to do that shall be worth the doing, a man with ambitions above mere trifling, mere groping in the dust of the past for facts that, when known, make no man happier, and no man better, and scarce a man wiser! Do you ever think,” she continued, carried away by the remembrance of Mr. Colet’s zeal, “of the sorrow and pain that are in the world? Of the vast riddles that are to be solved? Of the work that awaits the wisest and the strongest, and at which all in their degree can help? My uncle is an old man, it is well he should play with the past. I am a girl, it may serve for me. But what do you here?” She pointed to his table, laden with open folios and calf-bound volumes. “You spend a week in proving a Bohun marriage that is nothing to any one. Another, in raking up a blot that is better forgotten! A third in tracing to its source some ancient tag! You move a thousand books—to make one knight! Is that a man’s work?”
“At least,” he said huskily, “I do no harm.”