Spread. Ha! I don’t understand English trees—but it’s a curious place for a big tree like this, just outside the drawing-room window. Isn’t it in the way?
Jen. It is rather in the way.
Spread. I don’t like a tree before a window, it checks the current of fresh air—don’t you find that?
Jen. It does check the current of fresh air.
Spread. Then the leaves blow into the house in autumn, and that’s a nuisance—and besides, it impedes the view.
Jen. It is certainly open to these objections.
Spread. Then cut it down, my dear Jane. Why don’t you cut it down?
Jen. Cut it down! I wouldn’t cut it down for worlds. That tree is identified in my mind with many happy recollections.
Spread. Remarkable the influence exercised by associations over a woman’s mind. Observe—you take a house, mainly because it commands a beautiful view. You apportion the rooms principally with reference to that view. You lay out your garden at great expense to harmonize with that view, and, having brought that view into the very best of all possible conditions for the full enjoyment of it, you allow a gigantic and wholly irrelevant tree to block it all out for the sake of the sentimental ghost of some dead and gone sentimental reality! Take my advice and have it down. If I had had anything to do with it, you would never have planted it. I shouldn’t have allowed it!
Jen. You had so much to do with it that it was planted there at your suggestion.