He went out. At the foot of the stairs stood the Squire, hat in hand.
“I’m off, Lewis; it’s getting late,” he said.
“You don’t want any talk with me?” asked the Vicar, rather surprised.
“I do, I do—but I will write,” said Mr. Fenton, as he opened the front door hurriedly.
[CHAPTER XXVII
FOUR OPINIONS]
THOUGH Mr. Fenton had told the Vicar of Crishowell that he would write to him, he was in no hurry to do so. Harry’s love affair was a nuisance, and he put off the consideration of it for a week, merely looking askance upon his son when he came across him. To his wife he observed that Harry was making an ass of himself, and it was not till she insisted on his telling her everything he knew that the matter was discussed.
Lady Harriet was dismayed; she had hitherto understood her eldest son so well that his evident admiration of Miss Ridgeway had not disturbed her, for she classed her with the thousand and one other goddesses who had shed their glamour upon him at various times during the last ten years. They made a long procession, beginning with the little girls he had admired in his early school days. His safeguard, so far, had been that no one had taken him seriously.
But now he had apparently proposed to and been accepted by a young woman who knew extremely well what she was about, and one, moreover, whom his mother, with all her good sense and tolerance, had not been able to like. Putting aside the fact that she was anything but a good match for Harry, she knew that the whole atmosphere of Isoline’s world was a lower one than that in which he lived. He was a man who, with the right woman, might develop much, and, with the wrong one, deteriorate as much. He was generous, loyal to a fault, and eminently lovable. He was so affectionate that disenchantment by the woman he loved would make him suffer acutely, and he had not hardness of character enough to be able to make himself a life apart from that of his daily companions. Sorrow warps natures that have no pivot other than their own feelings; the centre is within themselves and all the weight comes upon it. And what sorrow is there more grinding than the knowledge that what we loved was a mean thing, what we admired, an unworthy one, what we dreamed about, a poor and squalid shadow?