“What other motive can I attribute to you?” he asked bitterly. “Is he not a peer? Is he not rich?”
“O Harry!” I cried, “you will drive me mad between you. Cannot a peer be a good man? Cannot a girl—I say—may not a girl—Harry, you force me to say it—is it not possible for a girl to fall in love with a man who is even a peer and a rich man? Go sir! you have humbled me, and made me say words of which I am ashamed. Go, if you please, and tell all the world what I have said.”
Then he fell to asking my forgiveness. He was, he said, wretched indeed: he had long lost my love.
“Man!” I said, “you never had it!”—and now he was like to lose my friendship.
This talk about friendship between a man and woman when both are young seems to me a mighty foolish thing. For if the woman is in love with some one else her friendship is, to be sure, worth just nothing at all, because she must needs be for ever thinking of the man she loves. There is but one man in all the world for her, and that man not he who would fain be her friend. Therefore she gives not a thought to him. Now if a man be in love with one woman and “in friendship” with another, I think that either his love for one must be a poor lukewarm passion, which I, for one, would not be anxious to receive, or his friendship for the other must be a chilly sort of thing.
However, one must not be angry for ever: Harry Temple had made me say a thing which I could not have said to any woman—not even Nancy—and was ashamed of having said: yet when he begged forgiveness I accorded it to him. Harry, I was sure, would not repeat what I had said.
Somebody about this time wrote another of those little worthless epigrams or poems, and handed it about:
“Kitty, a fair Dissenter grown,
Sad pattern doth afford:
The Temple’s laws she will not own,
Yet still doth love her Lord.”
“Do not be angry, Kitty,” said Nancy. “This is the penalty of greatness. What would Peggy Baker give to be lampooned? Harry is a fool, my dear. Any woman could tell, with half an eye, that you are not the least in love with him. What are the eyes of men like? Are they so blinded by vanity as not to be able to see, without being told, when they are disagreeable objects for a woman’s contemplation?”
“I condole with you, Miss Pleydell,” said Peggy Baker. “To be the victim of an irreligious and even impious epigram must be truly distressing to one, like yourself, brought up in the bosom of the Church.”