Mercy dropped her embroidery, and looked Horace full in the face. She, too, attached no common importance to what she had next to say.
“If I had not been connected with Lady Janet,” she began, “would you ever have thought of marrying me?”
“My love! what is the use of asking? You are connected with Lady Janet.”
She refused to let him escape answering her in that way.
“Suppose I had not been connected with Lady Janet?” she persisted. “Suppose I had only been a good girl, with nothing but my own merits to speak for me. What would your mother have said then?”
Horace still parried the question—only to find the point of it pressed home on him once more.
“Why do you ask?” he said.
“I ask to be answered,” she rejoined. “Would your mother have liked you to marry a poor girl, of no family—with nothing but her own virtues to speak for her?”
Horace was fairly pressed back to the wall.
“If you must know,” he replied, “my mother would have refused to sanction such a marriage as that.”