‘No one will say that you have been wrong to marry an American girl?’

‘Now, Carry, what is the meaning of all this?’

’Do you know any man in your position who ever did marry an American girl, any man of your rank in England?’ Mr Glascock began to think of the case, and could not at the moment remember any instance.  ’Charles, I do not think you ought to be the first.’

’And yet somebody must be first, if the thing is ever to be done, and I am too old to wait on the chance of being the second.’

She felt that at the rate she was now progressing she would only run from one little suggestion to another, and that he, either wilfully or in sheer simplicity, would take such suggestions simply as jokes; and she was aware that she lacked the skill to bring the conversation round gradually to the point which she was bound to reach.  She must make another dash, let it be ever so sudden.  Her mode of doing so would be crude, ugly, almost vulgar, she feared; but she would attain her object and say what she had to say.  When once she had warmed herself with the heat which argument would produce, then, she was pretty sure, she would find herself at least as strong as he.  ’I don’t know that the thing ought to be done at all,’ she said.  During the last moment or two he had put his arm round her waist; and she, not choosing to bid him desist from embracing her, but unwilling in her present mood to be embraced, got up and stood before him.  ’I have thought, and thought, and thought, and feel that it should not be done.  In marriage, like should go to like.’  She despised herself for using Wallachia’s words, but they fitted in so usefully, that she could not refrain from them.  ’I was wrong not to know it before, but it is better to know it now, than not to have known it till too late.  Everything that I hear and see tells me that it would be so.  If you were simply an Englishman, I would go anywhere with you; but I am not fit to be the wife of an English lord.  The time would come when I should be a disgrace to you, and then I should die.’

‘I think I should go near dying myself,’ said he, ’if you were a disgrace to me.’  He had not risen from his chair, and sat calmly looking up into her face.

‘We have made a mistake, and let us unmake it,’ she continued.  ’I will always be your friend.  I will correspond with you.  I will come and see your wife.’

‘That will be very kind!’

’Charles, if you laugh at me, I shall be angry with you.  It is right that you should look to your future life, as it is right that I should do so also.  Do you think that I am joking?  Do you suppose that I do not mean it?’

’You have taken an extra dose this morning of Wallachia Petrie, and of course you mean it.’

’If you think that I am speaking her mind and not my own, you do not know me.’

‘And what is it you propose?’ he said, still keeping his seat and looking calmly up into her face.