XX.
The effect of a thing is never quite what we have forecast. Mrs. Hilary heard Matt's confession without apparently anything of his tumult in making it. Women, after all, dwell mainly in the region of the affections; even the most worldly women have their likes and dislikes, and the question of the sort Matt had sprung upon his mother, is first a personal question with them. She was not a very worldly woman; but she liked her place in the world, and she preferred conformity and similarity; the people she was born of and bred with, were the nicest kind of people, and she did not see how any one could differ from them to advantage. Their ideas were the best, or they would not have had them; she, herself, did not wish to have other ideas. But her family was more, far more, to her than her world was. She knew that in his time her husband had not had the ideas of her world concerning slavery, but she had always contrived to honor the ideas of both. Since her son had begun to disagree with her world concerning what he called the industrial slavery, she contrived, without the sense of inconsistency, to suffer him and yet remain with the world. She represented in her maternal tolerance, the principle actuating the church, which includes the facts as fast as they accomplish themselves, without changing any point of doctrine.
"Then you mean, Matt," she asked, "that you are going to marry her?"
"Yes," said Matt, "that is what I mean," and then, something in his mother's way of taking it nettled him on Sue's behalf. "But I don't know that my marrying her necessarily followed from my asking her. I expected her to refuse me."
"Men always do; I don't know why," said Mrs. Hilary. "But in this case I can't imagine it."
"Can't imagine it? I can imagine it!" Matt retorted; but his mother did not seem to notice his resentment.
"Then, if it's quite settled, you don't wish me to say anything?"
"I wish you to say everything, mother—all that you feel and think—about her, and the whole affair. But I don't wish you to think—I can't let you think—that she has ever, by one look or word, allowed me to suppose that my offer would be welcome."
"Oh, I didn't mean that," said Mrs. Hilary. "She would be too proud for that. But I've no doubt it was welcome." Matt fretted in silence, but he allowed his mother to go on. "She is a very proud girl, and I've no doubt that what she's been through has intensified her pride."