“Oh no, thank you! I wouldn’t tell you such an improper matter for the world!”
“If his father and mother had lived in the north or east of England,” gallantly persisted Elfride, though her sobs began to interrupt her articulation, “anywhere but here—you—would have—only regarded—HIM, and not THEM! His station—would have—been what—his profession makes it,—and not fixed by—his father’s humble position—at all; whom he never lives with—now. Though John Smith has saved lots of money, and is better off than we are, they say, or he couldn’t have put his son to such an expensive profession. And it is clever and—honourable—of Stephen, to be the best of his family.”
“Yes. ‘Let a beast be lord of beasts, and his crib shall stand at the king’s mess.’”
“You insult me, papa!” she burst out. “You do, you do! He is my own Stephen, he is!”
“That may or may not be true, Elfride,” returned her father, again uncomfortably agitated in spite of himself “You confuse future probabilities with present facts,—what the young man may be with what he is. We must look at what he is, not what an improbable degree of success in his profession may make him. The case is this: the son of a working-man in my parish who may or may not be able to buy me up—a youth who has not yet advanced so far into life as to have any income of his own deserving the name, and therefore of his father’s degree as regards station—wants to be engaged to you. His family are living in precisely the same spot in England as yours, so throughout this county—which is the world to us—you would always be known as the wife of Jack Smith the mason’s son, and not under any circumstances as the wife of a London professional man. It is the drawback, not the compensating fact, that is talked of always. There, say no more. You may argue all night, and prove what you will; I’ll stick to my words.”
Elfride looked silently and hopelessly out of the window with large heavy eyes and wet cheeks.
“I call it great temerity—and long to call it audacity—in Hewby,” resumed her father. “I never heard such a thing—giving such a hobbledehoy native of this place such an introduction to me as he did. Naturally you were deceived as well as I was. I don’t blame you at all, so far.” He went and searched for Mr. Hewby’s original letter. “Here’s what he said to me: ‘Dear Sir,—Agreeably to your request of the 18th instant, I have arranged to survey and make drawings,’ et cetera. ‘My assistant, Mr. Stephen Smith,’—assistant, you see he called him, and naturally I understood him to mean a sort of partner. Why didn’t he say ‘clerk’?”
“They never call them clerks in that profession, because they do not write. Stephen—Mr. Smith—told me so. So that Mr. Hewby simply used the accepted word.”
“Let me speak, please, Elfride! My assistant, Mr. Stephen Smith, will leave London by the early train to-morrow morning...MANY THANKS FOR YOUR PROPOSAL TO ACCOMMODATE HIM...YOU MAY PUT EVERY CONFIDENCE IN HIM, and may rely upon his discernment in the matter of church architecture.’ Well, I repeat that Hewby ought to be ashamed of himself for making so much of a poor lad of that sort.”
“Professional men in London,” Elfride argued, “don’t know anything about their clerks’ fathers and mothers. They have assistants who come to their offices and shops for years, and hardly even know where they live. What they can do—what profits they can bring the firm—that’s all London men care about. And that is helped in him by his faculty of being uniformly pleasant.”