"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." But she passed this over; she was too visibly sincere. "Father!" "I don't quite see what's the matter with you," he said, "and if you can't pull yourself together I'll—upon my honour—take you in hand.
Put you into a cab and deliver you again safe at Lancaster Gate."
She was really absent, distant.
"Father."
It was too much, and he met it sharply.