VIOLET.
What is the use of having money if you have to work for it? [She rises impatiently]. It's all nonsense, Mr Malone: you must enable your son to keep up his position.
It is his right.
MALONE. [grimly] I should not advise you to marry him on the strength of that right, Miss Robinson.
Violet, who has almost lost her temper, controls herself with an effort; unclenches her fingers; and resumes her seat with studied tranquillity and reasonableness.
VIOLET.
What objection have you to me, pray?
My social position is as good as Hector's, to say the least.
He admits it.
MALONE. [shrewdly] You tell him so from time to time, eh?
Hector's social position in England, Miss Robinson, is just what I choose to buy for him.
I have made him a fair offer. Let him pick out the most historic house, castle or abbey that England contains.
The day that he tells me he wants it for a wife worthy of its traditions, I buy it for him, and give him the means of keeping it up.
VIOLET.
What do you mean by a wife worthy of its traditions?
Cannot any well bred woman keep such a house for him?
MALONE.
No: she must be born to it.
VIOLET.
Hector was not born to it, was he?
MALONE.
His granmother was a barefooted Irish girl that nursed me by a turf fire.
Let him marry another such, and I will not stint her marriage portion.
Let him raise himself socially with my money or raise somebody else so long as there is a social profit somewhere, I'll regard my expenditure as justified. But there must be a profit for someone.
A marriage with you would leave things just where they are.
VIOLET.
Many of my relations would object very much to my marrying the grandson of a common woman, Mr Malone.
That may be prejudice; but so is your desire to have him marry a title prejudice.
MALONE. [rising, and approaching her with a scrutiny in which there is a good deal of reluctant respect] You seem a pretty straightforward downright sort of a young woman.
VIOLET.
I do not see why I should be made miserably poor because I cannot make profits for you.
Why do you want to make Hector unhappy?
MALONE.
He will get over it all right enough.
Men thrive better on disappointments in love than on disappointments in money.
I daresay you think that sordid; but I know what I'm talking about.
My father died of starvation in Ireland in the black 47, Maybe you've heard of it.
VIOLET.
The Famine?
MALONE. [with smouldering passion] No, the starvation.
When a country is full of food, and exporting it, there can be no famine.
My father was starved dead; and I was starved out to America in my mother's arms.
English rule drove me and mine out of Ireland.
Well, you can keep Ireland.
I and my like are coming back to buy England; and we'll buy the best of it.
I want no middle class properties and no middle class women for Hector.
That's straightforward isn't it, like yourself?
VIOLET. [icily pitying his sentimentality] Really, Mr Malone, I am astonished to hear a man of your age and good sense talking in that romantic way.
Do you suppose English noblemen will sell their places to you for the asking?
MALONE.