The Proposal

He came at a quarter past eight on the morning she was to leave.

Corinne had gone to the village with Preston. Hollis had a headache, or said she had, and had stayed in the small front room with a book and the dog, and the door was answered by nobody, and then there he was in the doorway in a coat wet from the drive, having let himself in past a cleaning woman who was upstairs.

"Miss Arden."

"Mr. Ashcroft. My sister Mrs. Pell — "

"Is not here. I know. I have come to speak to you and I will not be interrupted, and if you will sit down I will say what I have to say as quickly as I can."

She sat. He stood. There was no grace in any of it. He was pale, and he spoke the way a man speaks who has had the speech in his head for three days and has decided to deliver it exactly as written, in spite of everything, in the teeth of the fact that it is the wrong speech.

"You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you."

She said nothing. He went on.

He had struggled, he said. He had struggled against his judgment, against his family's expectation, against the sense of what was due to his position and to the name he carried, and against every argument of reason and suitability, and he had been beaten by it, and he was here. The misfortune of her family — a father who had let a property go to ruin for a cousin, a mother without connections, a sister of eighteen who behaved in public in a manner that had been discussed in Ashford — was nothing against her. It was nothing. He had decided to disregard it entirely. He had decided to disregard the whole apparatus of his own life for her, and he expected her to understand what that cost him.

"My objections to the marriage," he said, "were stronger than my objections to anything I have ever done, and I have overcome them."

He stopped. She looked at him.

"Thank you," she said. "I am very sensible of the honour. It is impossible for me to accept it."

He did not understand. He stood there for two seconds with the whole speech still in his face and said, "I beg your pardon."

"It is impossible."

"You will allow me — "

"It is impossible. It has been impossible since the twenty-third of April, when you stood by a coffee urn and said that I was not handsome enough to tempt you."

"That was a private remark."

"It was a remark in a room with a hundred people in it, and I have told it as a joke for a year, and it was true, and you meant it, and you mean it now. You are standing in my sister's front room telling me that you love me in the teeth of your own judgment, and I am obliged to tell you that I have known from the first that you would never marry me without despising yourself for it, and I would rather be poor than be pitied by you."

He said, "This is the answer of a woman who has been flattered by Mr. Cray."

She went absolutely white.

"Mr. Cray," he said, "was given ten thousand dollars at his own request in place of a position he had no qualifications for, and has gambled it, and has borrowed from three men in this county, and has been told to leave an establishment in Poughkeepsie for debts. You have heard a story. I do not know what story. I know that he is engaged in nothing that a man with a future would be engaged in, and I know that you have heard his side of it and not mine."

"I have heard his side," she said. "And I have heard that you turned a young man out of a house his father had kept for thirty years and gave him a check, and I have heard it from his own mouth and from your aunt's table, where your cousin said 'extremely' and looked at you while he said it."

There was a silence in the room with the dog in it.

"And my sister," she said. "You separated my sister from the only man who has ever been kind to her, and you did it in a week, and you did it because we are provincial and because my mother is embarrassing and because my sister is sixteen and you cannot bear the sight of us, and you have come here this morning to tell me that you have overcome all of that." She stood up. "You have not overcome any of it. You are standing here with it in your mouth."

He left. He did not say another word. He walked out into the wet April morning and drove away, and Hollis sat down in the chair by the window with her hands over her face and stayed there for an hour, and the dog put its head on her knee and did not move, and when Corinne came back at eleven she found her sitting straight in the chair with her eyes dry and her whole body shaking.