Part 35

“I’m going to ask your daughter to marry me!” I said. “I think we’ve been waiting long enough.”

“I don’t approve of long engagements either,” said her father. “But Marion will have her own way about it, anyhow. Seen this new powdered fertiliser?”

I went in to talk to Mrs. Ramboat. “She’ll want time to get her things,” said Mrs. Ramboat....

I and Marion sat down together on a little seat under some trees at the top of Putney Hill, and I came to my point abruptly.

“Look here, Marion,” I said, “are you going to marry me or are you not?”

She smiled at me. “Well,” she said, “we’re engaged—aren’t we?”

“That can’t go on for ever. Will you marry me next week?”

She looked me in the face. “We can’t,” she said.

“You promised to marry me when I had three hundred a year.”

She was silent for a space. “Can’t we go on for a time as we are? We could marry on three hundred a year. But it means a very little house. There’s Smithie’s brother. They manage on two hundred and fifty, but that’s very little. She says they have a semi-detached house almost on the road, and hardly a bit of garden. And the wall to next-door is so thin they hear everything. When her baby cries—they rap. And people stand against the railings and talk.... Can’t we wait? You’re doing so well.”

An extraordinary bitterness possessed me at this invasion of the stupendous beautiful business of love by sordid necessity. I answered her with immense restraint.

“If,” I said, “we could have a double-fronted, detached house—at Ealing, say—with a square patch of lawn in front and a garden behind—and—and a tiled bathroom.”

“That would be sixty pounds a year at least.”

“Which means five hundred a year.... Yes, well, you see, I told my uncle I wanted that, and I’ve got it.”

“Got what?”

“Five hundred pounds a year.”

“Five hundred pounds!”

I burst into laughter that had more than a taste of bitterness.

“Yes,” I said, “really! and now what do you think?”

“Yes,” she said, a little flushed; “but be sensible! Do you really mean you’ve got a Rise, all at once, of two hundred a year?”

“To marry on—yes.”

She scrutinised me a moment. “You’ve done this as a surprise!” she said, and laughed at my laughter. She had become radiant, and that made me radiant, too.

“Yes,” I said, “yes,” and laughed no longer bitterly.

She clasped her hands and looked me in the eyes.

She was so pleased that I forgot absolutely my disgust of a moment before. I forgot that she had raised her price two hundred pounds a year and that I had bought her at that.

“Come!” I said, standing up; “let’s go towards the sunset, dear, and talk about it all. Do you know—this is a most beautiful world, an amazingly beautiful world, and when the sunset falls upon you it makes you into shining gold. No, not gold—into golden glass.... Into something better that either glass or gold.”...

And for all that evening I wooed her and kept her glad. She made me repeat my assurances over again and still doubted a little.

We furnished that double-fronted house from attic—it ran to an attic—to cellar, and created a garden.