Page:The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman.djvu/54

 “Yes,” he said.

“Oh, I should think it very likely,” I told him; “I wondered whether you meant, would you make her happy?”

“I should certainly hope to do that,” he answered. “We all hope,” I said. ..

My responsibility is confined to giving him a moment’s pause for thought. Phyllida will tell you that I set him against her, poisoned his mind, I shouldn’t wonder. . . It’s most charitable to recognize that she really did not know what she was saying. I didn’t talk about him at all; I talked about Will, about my nephew Culroyd, their friends, their lives. . . Any deductions were of his drawing; and, goodness me, one need not be branded a snob for seeing that they had been born and bred in different worlds. He seemed to think that love would overcome everything.

“If you’re in love,” he kept saying, “these things don’t matter, do they?”

What made him uncomfortable was the money question—the thought that he would be bringing literally nothing. I was most careful not to say anything, but every child knows that if you divide a sum of money by two. . . He would be living on Phyllida; and, if he loved her as much as he pretended, he would