Page:The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (emended first edition), Volume 3.djvu/156

146 "and if I," said she, "am young in years I am old in sorrow; but even if trouble should fail to kill me before vice destroys him, think, if he reached but fifty years or so, would you wait twenty or fifteen—in vague uncertainty and suspense—through all the prime of youth and manhood—and marry at last a woman faded and worn as I shall be—without ever having seen me from this day to that?—You would not," she continued interrupting my earnest protestations of unfailing constancy,—"or if you would you should not. Trust me, Gilbert; in this matter I know better than you. You think me cold and stony hearted, and you may, but—"

"I don't Helen."

"Well, never mind; you might if you would—but I have not spent my solitude in utter idleness, and I am not speaking now from the impulse of the moment as you do; I have thought of all these matters again and again; I have argued these questions with myself, and pondered well our past, and present, and future