'Certainly not to-morrow.'
'I would be entirely in your hands in that matter. I will not urge you
to be precipitate--I could not expect you to be ready yet. My suddenness
perhaps offended you; but, having thought deeply of this bright
possibility, I was apt to forget the forbearance that one ought to show
at first in mentioning it. If I have done wrong forgive me.'
'I will think of that,' said Ethelberta, with a cooler manner. 'But
seriously, all these words are nothing to the purpose. I must remark
that I prize your friendship, but it is not for me to marry now. You
have convinced me of your goodness of heart and freedom from unworthy
suspicions; let that be enough. The best way in which I in my turn can
convince you of my goodness of heart is by asking you to see me in
private no more.'
'And do you refuse to think of me as ---. Why do you treat me like that,
after all?' said Neigh, surprised at this want of harmony with his
principle that one convert to matrimony could always find a second ready-
made.
'I cannot explain, I cannot explain,' said she, impatiently. 'I would
and I would not--explain I mean, not marry. I don't love anybody, and I
have no heart left for beginning. It is only honest in me to tell you
that I am interested in watching another man's career, though that is not
to the point either, for no close relationship with him is contemplated.
But I do not wish to speak of this any more. Do not press me to it.'
'Certainly I will not,' said Neigh, seeing that she was distressed and
sorrowful. 'But do consider me and my wishes; I have a right to ask it
for it is only asking a continuance of what you have already begun to do.
To-morrow I believe I shall have the happiness of seeing you again.'
She did not say no, and long after the door had closed upon him she
remained fixed in thought. 'How can he be blamed for his manner,' she
said, 'after knowing what I did!'
Ethelberta as she sat felt herself much less a Petherwin than a
Chickerel, much less a poetess richly freighted with fancy than an
adventuress with a nebulous prospect. Neigh was one of the few men whose
presence seemed to attenuate her dignity in some mysterious way to its
very least proportions; and that act of espial, which had so quickly and
inexplicably come to his knowledge, helped his influence still more. She
knew little of the nature of the town bachelor; there were opaque depths
in him which her thoughts had never definitely plumbed. Notwithstanding
her exaltation to the atmosphere of the Petherwin family, Ethelberta was
very far from having the thoroughbred London woman's knowledge of sets,
grades, coteries, cliques, forms, glosses, and niceties, particularly on
the masculine side. Setting the years from her infancy to her first look
into town against those linking that epoch with the present, the former
period covered not only the greater time, but contained the mass of her
most vivid impressions of life and its ways. But in recognizing her
ignorance of the ratio between words to women and deeds to women in the
ethical code of the bachelor of the club, she forgot that human nature in
the gross differs little with situation, and that a gift which, if the
germs were lacking, no amount of training in clubs and coteries could
supply, was mother-wit like her own.