Mr. Tristram felt relieved.  Here at last; was the reproach he had been expecting.

He assured her she did well to be angry.  He accused himself once more.  He denounced the accursed morals of the day, above which he ought to have risen, the morals, if she did but know it, of all unmarried men.

“That is a hit at Mr. Scarlett,” she said, scornfully, to herself, and then her cheek blanched as she remembered that Hugh was not exempt, after all.  She became suddenly tired, impatient; but she waited quietly for the inevitable proposal.

Mr. Tristram, who had the gift of emphatic and facile utterance, which the conventional consider to be the sign-manual of genius, had become so entangled in the morals of the age that it took him some time to extricate himself from the subject before he could pass on to plead, in an impassioned manner, the cause of the man, unworthy though he might be, who had long loved her, loved her now, and would always love her, in this world and the next.

It was the longest proposal Rachel had ever had, and she had had many.  But if the proposal was long, the refusal was longer.  Rachel, who had a good memory, led up to it by opining that the artistic life made great demands, that the true artist must live entirely for his art, that domestic life might prove a hinderance.  She had read somewhere that high hopes fainted on warm hearthstones.  Mr. Tristram demolished these objections as ruthlessly as ducks peck their own ducklings if they have not seen them for a day or two.

Even when she was forced to become more explicit, it was at first impossible to Mr. Tristram to believe she would finally reject him.  But the knowledge, deep-rooted as a forest oak, that she had loved him devotedly could not at last prevail against the odious conviction that she was determined not to marry him.

“Then, in that case, you never loved me?”

“I do not love you now.”

“You are determined not to marry?”

“On the contrary, I hope to do so.”

Rachel’s words took her by surprise.  She had no idea till that moment that she hoped anything of the kind.

“You prefer some one else.  That is the real truth.”

“I prefer several others.”

Mr. Tristram looked suspiciously at her.  Her answers did not tally with his previous knowledge of her.  Perhaps he forgot that he had set his docile pupil rather a long holiday task to learn in his absence, and she had learned it.

“You think you would be happier with some fortune-hunter of an aristocrat than with a plain man of your own class, who, whatever his faults may be, loves you for yourself.”

Why is it that the word aristocrat as applied to a gentleman is as offensive as that of flunkey applied to a footman?

Rachel drew herself up imperceptibly.

“That depends upon the fortune-hunter,” she said, with that touch of hauteur which, when the vulgar have at last drawn it upon themselves by the insolence which is the under side of their courtesy, always has the same effect on them as a red rag on a bull.