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72 his chair still closer to it, "his selfishness makes him exacting, you see; and his obstinacy makes him resolute in his exactions. The consequence is that he has always exacted a great deal from me in the way of respect, and submission, and self-denial when his wishes were in question, and so forth. I have borne a great deal from him, because I have been under obligations to him (if one can ever be said to be under obligations to one's own grandfather), and because I have been really attached to him; but we have had a great many quarrels for all that, for I could not accommodate myself to his ways very often—not out of the least reference to myself you understand, but because" he stammered here, and was rather at a loss.

Mr. Pinch being about the worst man in the world to help anybody out of a difficulty of this sort, said nothing.

"Well! as you understand me," resumed Martin quickly, "I needn't hunt for the precise expression I want. Now, I come to the cream of my story, and the occasion of my being here. I am in love, Pinch."

Mr. Pinch looked up into his face with increased interest.

"I say I am in love. I am in love with one of the most beautiful girls the sun ever shone upon. But she is wholly and entirely dependent upon the pleasure of my grandfather; and if he were to know that she favoured my passion, she would lose her home and everything she possesses in the world. There is nothing very selfish in that love, I think?"

"Selfish!" cried Tom. "You have acted nobly. To love her as I am sure you do, and yet in consideration for her state of dependence, not even to disclose---"

"What are you talking about, Pinch?" said Martin pettishly: "don't make yourself ridiculous, my good fellow! What do you mean by not disclosing?"

"I beg your pardon," answered Tom. "I thought you meant that, or I wouldn't have said it."

"If I didn't tell her I loved her, where would be the use of my being in love?" said Martin: "unless to keep myself in a perpetual state of worry and vexation?"

"That's true," Tom answered. "Well! I can guess what she said when you told her?" he added, glancing at Martin's handsome face.

"Why, not exactly, Pinch," he rejoined, with a slight frown: "because she has some girlish notions about duty and gratitude, and all the rest of it, which are rather hard to fathom; but in the main you are right. Her heart was mine, I found."

"Just what I supposed," said Tom. "Quite natural!" and, in his great satisfaction, he took a long sip out of his wine-glass.

"Although I had conducted myself from the first with the utmost circumspection," pursued Martin, "I had not managed matters so well but that my grandfather, who is full of jealousy and distrust, suspected me of loving her. He said nothing to her, but straightway attacked me in private, and charged me with designing to corrupt the fidelity to himself (there you observe his selfishness), of a young creature whom he had trained and educated to be his only disinterested and faithful companion when he should have disposed of me in marriage to his heart's