"But you mean, practically, to let Marian collar it?" They stood there
face to face, but she so denied herself to his challenge that he could
only go on. "You've a view of three hundred a year for her in addition
to what her husband left her with? Is _that,"_ the remote progenitor of
such wantonness audibly wondered, "your morality?"
Kate found her answer without trouble. "Is it your idea that I should
give you everything?"
The "everything" clearly struck him--to the point even of determining
the tone of his reply. "Far from it. How can you ask that when I refuse
what you tell me you came to offer? Make of my idea what you can; I
think I've sufficiently expressed it, and it's at any rate to take or
to leave. It's the only one, I may nevertheless add; it's the basket
with all my eggs. It's my conception, in short, of your duty."
The girl's tired smile watched the word as if it had taken on a small
grotesque visibility. "You're wonderful on such subjects! I think I
should leave you in no doubt," she pursued, "that if I were to sign my
aunt's agreement I should carry it out, in honour, to the letter."
"Rather, my own love! It's just your honour that I appeal to. The only
way to play the game _is_ to play it. There's no limit to what your
aunt can do for you."
"Do you mean in the way of marrying me?"
"What else should I mean? Marry properly----"
"And then?" Kate asked as he hung fire.
"And then--well, I _will_ talk with you. I'll resume relations."
She looked about her and picked up her parasol. "Because you're not so
afraid of any one else in the world as you are of _her?_ My husband, if
I should marry, would be, at the worst, less of a terror? If that's
what you mean, there may be something in it. But doesn't it depend a
little also on what you mean by my getting a proper one? However," Kate
added as she picked out the frill of her little umbrella, "I don't
suppose your idea of him is _quite_ that he should persuade you to live
with us."
"Dear no--not a bit." He spoke as not resenting either the fear or the
hope she imputed; met both imputations, in fact, with a sort of
intellectual relief. "I place the case for you wholly in your aunt's
hands. I take her view, with my eyes shut; I accept in all confidence
any man she selects. If he's good enough for _her_--elephantine snob as
she is--he's good enough for me; and quite in spite of the fact that
she'll be sure to select one who can be trusted to be nasty to me. My
only interest is in your doing what she wants. You shan't be so beastly
poor, my darling," Mr. Croy declared, "if I can help it."
"Well then, good-bye, papa," the girl said after a reflection on this
that had perceptibly ended for her in a renunciation of further debate.
"Of course you understand that it may be for long."
Her companion, hereupon, had one of his finest inspirations. "Why not,
frankly, for ever? You must do me the justice to see that I don't do
things, that I've never done them, by halves--that if I offer you to
efface myself, it's for the final, fatal sponge that I ask, well
saturated and well applied."
She turned her handsome, quiet face upon him at such length that it
might well have been for the last time. "I don't know what you're like."
"No more do I, my dear. I've spent my life in trying, in vain, to
discover. Like nothing--more's the pity. If there had been many of us,
and we could have found each other out, there's no knowing what we
mightn't have done. But it doesn't matter now. Good-bye, love." He
looked even not sure of what she would wish him to suppose on the
subject of a kiss, yet also not embarrassed by his uncertainty.
She forbore in fact for a moment longer to clear it up. "I wish there
were some one here who might serve--for any contingency--as a witness
that I _have_ put it to you that I'm ready to come."
"Would you like me," her father asked, "to call the landlady?"
"You may not believe me," she pursued, "but I came really hoping you
might have found some way. I'm very sorry, at all events, to leave you
unwell." He turned away from her, on this, and, as he had done before,
took refuge, by the window, in a stare at the street. "Let me put
it--unfortunately without a witness," she added after a moment, "that
there's only one word you really need speak."
When he took this up it was still with his back to her. "If I don't
strike you as having already spoken it, our time has been singularly
wasted."
"I'll engage with you in respect to my aunt exactly to what she wants
of me in respect to you. She wants me to choose. Very well, I _will_
choose. I'll wash my hands of her for you to just that tune."
He at last brought himself round. "Do you know, dear, you make me sick?
I've tried to be clear, and it isn't fair."