“Why, I mean that you would not render yourself so ridiculous in the eyes of society. You marry Bob Dunning—the son of a grocer—you, who belong to the first families, and who ought to make a most advantageous match! Why, Fanny dear, no wonder I contradicted it.”
“I regret that you took the trouble.”
“Oh! it was none at all, and our families had been so long on friendly terms, that I thought it but right to say you would not throw yourself away.”
“Allow me to ask why you speak in this manner,” said Miss Austin, now fully roused, and recovering her self-possession, “if I should marry Mr. Dunning, how could I be thought to throw myself away?”
“What a question! Why the man has neither family nor fortune to boast of, while you have both.”
“As far as money is concerned, I grant you I have the advantage; but as for family, few of us republicans can boast on that score. My grandmother, and yours too, Mrs. Tremaine, superintended their own dairies, made butter and cheese with their own hands, and sent them to market to be sold, nor did I ever hear that the good ladies were ashamed of their domestic employments. Your father and mine commenced life with naught save probity and perseverance; they were first clerks, then junior partners, and at last great capitalists, and we their children have thus been placed at the head of society.”
“I know nothing at all of this nonsensical grandmother story about butter and cheese. I never heard of such a thing in our family.”
“No, I suppose you did not. You have been taught to look on praiseworthy industry as derogatory to your ideas of gentility; but my father has always delighted in recurring to those days of boyhood, and he venerates the memory of his mother, whom he regarded while living as a pattern of domestic virtue.”
“Oh, it is all nonsense talking in this way, Fanny. I wonder what Baron d’Haut-ton will say when he hears that the lady he wooed so unsuccessfully has been won by the heir of a man in the ‘sugar line?’ ”
“Pardon me, Mrs. Tremaine, if I say you are forgetting yourself, or at least that you are presuming too far on your long acquaintance. My parents have no such ideas as yours, about fortune and family, and with their approval my heart is proud of its choice—proud, too, that it has been the chosen of the gifted, the noble-minded Dunning.”