I do hope that I may see you sometimes. I cannot explain to you how very much out of your line “we” shall be;—for of course there is a “we.” People are more separated with us than they are, I suppose, with you. And my “we” is a very poor man, who works hard at writing in a dingy newspaper office, and we shall live in a garret and have brown sugar in our tea, and eat hashed mutton. And I shall have nothing a year to buy my clothes with. Still I mean to do it; and I don’t mean to be long before I do do it. When a girl has made up her mind to be married, she had better go on with it at once, and take it all afterwards as it may come. Nevertheless, perhaps, we may see each other somewhere, and I may be able to introduce you to the dearest, honestest, very best, and most affectionate man in the world. And he is very, very clever.
LXXXI
Mr. Glascock Is Master
Caroline Spalding, when she received Nora’s letter, was not disposed to give much weight to it. She declared to herself that the girl’s unpremeditated expression of opinion was worth more than her studied words. But she was not the less grateful or the less loving towards her new friend. She thought how nice it would be to have Nora at that splendid abode in England of which she had heard so much—but she thought also that in that splendid abode she herself ought never to have part or share. If it were the case that this were an unfitting match, it was clearly her duty to decide that there should be no marriage. Nora had been quite right in bidding her speak to Mr. Glascock himself, and to Mr. Glascock she would go. But it was very difficult for her to determine on the manner in which she would discuss the subject with him. She thought that she could be firm if her mind were once made up. She believed that perhaps she was by nature more firm than he. In all their intercourse together he had ever yielded to her; and though she had been always pleased and grateful, there had grown upon her an idea that he was perhaps too easy—that he was a man as to whom it was necessary that they who loved him should see that he was not led away by weakness into folly. But she would want to learn something from him before her decision was finally reached, and in this she foresaw a great difficulty. In her trouble she went to her usual counsellor—the Republican Browning. In such an emergency she could hardly have done worse. “Wally,” she said, “we talk about England, and Italy, and France, as though we knew all about them; but how hard it is to realise the difference between one’s own country and others.”
“We can at least learn a great deal that is satisfactory,” said Wallachia. “About one out of every five Italians can read a book, about two out of every five Englishmen can read a book. Out of every five New Englanders four and four-fifths can read a book. I guess that is knowing a good deal.”
“I don’t mean in statistics.”
“I cannot conceive how you are to learn anything about any country except by statistics. I have just discovered that the number of illegitimate children—”
“Oh, Wally, I can’t talk about that—not now at least. What I cannot realise is this—what sort of a life it is that they will lead at Monkhams.”
“Plenty to eat and drink, I guess; and you’ll always have to go round in fine clothes.”
“And that will be all?”
“No;—not all. There will be carriages and horses, and all manner of people there who won’t care much about you. If he is firm—very firm;—if he have that firmness which one does not often meet, even in an American man, he will be able, after a while, to give you a position as an English woman of rank.” It is to be feared that Wallachia Petrie had been made aware of Caroline’s idea as to Mr. Glascock’s want of purpose.
“And that will be all?”
“If you have a baby, they’ll let you go and see it two or three times a day. I don’t suppose you will be allowed to nurse it, because they never do in England. You have read what the Saturday Review says. In every other respect the Saturday Review has been the falsest of all false periodicals, but I guess it has been pretty true in what it has said about English women.”
“I wish I knew more about it really.”
“When a man has to leap through a window in the dark, Caroline, of course he doubts whether the feather bed said to be below will be soft enough for him.”
“I shouldn’t fear the leap for myself, if it wouldn’t hurt him. Do you think it possible that society can be so formed that a man should lose caste because he doesn’t marry just one of his own set?”
“It has been so all over the world, my dear. If like to like is to be true anywhere, it should be true in marriage.”
“Yes;—but with a difference. He and I are like to like. We come of the same race, we speak the same language, we worship the same God, we have the same ideas of culture and of pleasures. The difference is one that is not patent to the eye or to the ear. It is a difference of accidental incident, not of nature or of acquirement.”
“I guess you would find, Caroline,
