true; but marriage was a thing which Marion never could hear proposed, even by her own mother, with any patience; and, as a consequence, to use marriage as an argument in support of dress, was to insure the rejection of the argument. Marriage, said Marion, was, to begin with, a thing to which her whole character and temperament were utterly opposed. She was herself too much like a man ever to care for a man, or not to despise him. In the next place, if a girl had not enough in her to win an honest man’s love, in spite of any external disadvantages, then the best thing for her would be not to be loved at all. Love, this young dissenter would go on to observe, is something sacred, if it is anything; and so pure and sensitive, that it were infinitely better to forego it altogether than to run the least risk of getting it mixed up with any temporal or expedient considerations. And since, she would add, it seems to be impossible nowadays ever to get love in that unsullied and virginal condition, she for her part intended to give it a wide berth if ever it came in her way—which she was quite sure it never would; because it takes two to make a bargain, and not only would she never be one of the two, but, if she were to be so, she thanked God that she had so ugly a face and so unconciliating a temper that no man would venture to put up with her; unless, perhaps, she were possessed of five or ten thousand a year; from which misfortune it was manifestly the beneficent purpose of Providence to secure her. The upshot of this diatribe was that she did not care how shabby and ungenteel her clothes were, so long as they were clean and covered her; and that even if she could afford to hire a dressmaker, she would still prefer to do her making and mending herself; because no one so well as herself could comprehend what she wanted.
“You should not call yourself ugly, Marion,” her mother would reply: “at any rate, you should not think yourself ugly. A girl generally appears to others like what she is in the habit of thinking herself to be. Half the women who are called beauties are not really beautiful; but they have persuaded themselves that they are so, and then other people believe it. People in this world so seldom take the pains to think or to judge for themselves; they take what is given to them. Besides, to think a thing, really does a great deal toward making it come true. If you think you are pretty, you will grow prettier every day. And if you keep on talking about being ugly. … You have a very striking, intelligent face, my dear, and your smile is very charming indeed.”
Marion laughed scornfully. “Believing a lie is not the way to invent truth,” she said. “All the imagination in England won’t make me different from what I am. Whether I am ugly or not, I’m not a fool, and I shan’t give anybody the right to call me one by behaving as if I fancied I were somebody else. I am very well as I am,” she continued, wringing out a towel and spreading it out on the clothes-horse to dry. “I should be too jealous and suspicious to make a man happy, and I don’t mean to try it. You don’t understand that; but you were made to be married, and I wasn’t, and that’s the reason.”
Nevertheless, the income continued to be insufficient, and inroads continued to be made on the capital, much to the friendly distress of Sir Francis Bendibow, the head of the great banking-house of Bendibow Brothers, to whose care the funds of the late Major Lockhart had been intrusted “The first guinea you withdraw from your capital, my dear madam,” he had assured Mrs. Lockhart, with his usual manner of impressive courtesy, “represents your first step on the road that leads to bankruptcy.” The widow admitted the truth of the maxim; but misfortunes are not always curable in proportion as they are undeniable; though that seemed to be Sir Francis’ assumption. Mrs. Lockhart began to suffer from her anxieties. Marion saw this, and was in despair. “What a good-for-nothing thing a woman is!” she exclaimed bitterly. “If I were a man I would earn our living.” She understood something of music, and sang and played with great refinement and expression: but her talent in this direction was natural, not acquired, and she was not sufficiently grounded in the science of the accomplishment to have any chance of succeeding as a teacher. What was to be done?
“What do you say to selling the house and grounds, and going into lodgings?” she said one day.
“It would help us for a time, but not for always,” the mother replied. “Lodgings are so expensive.”
“The house is a great deal bigger than we need,” said Marion.
“We should be no better off if it were smaller,” said Mrs. Lockhart.
There was a long pause. Suddenly Marion jumped to her feet, while the light of inspiration brightened over her face. “Why, mother, what is to prevent us letting our spare rooms to lodgers?” she cried out.
“Oh, that would be impossible!” returned the mother in dismay. “The rooms that your dear father used to live in!”
“That is what we must do,” answered Marion firmly; and in the end, as we have seen, that was what they did.
CHAPTER V.
THE third of May passed away, and, beyond the hanging up in the window of the card with “Lodgings to Let” written on it, nothing new had happened in the house at Hammersmith. But the exhibition of that card had been to Mrs. Lockhart an event of such momentous and tragic importance, that she did not know whether she were most astonished, relieved, or disappointed that it had produced no perceptible effect upon the outer universe.
“It seems to be of no use,” she said to her daughter, while the latter was assisting her in her morning toilet. “Had we not better take down the card, and try to think of something else. Couldn’t we keep half-a-dozen fowls, and sell the eggs?”
“How faint-hearted you are, mother!”
“Besides, even if somebody were to pass here who wanted lodgings, they could never think of looking through the gate; and if they did, I doubt whether they could see the card.”
“I have thought of that; and when I got up this morning I tied the card to the gate itself. Nobody can fail to see it there.”
“Oh, Marion! It is almost as if we were setting up a shop.”
“Everybody is more or less a shopkeeper,” replied Marion philosophically. “Some people sell rank, others beauty, others cleverness, others their souls to the devil: we might do worse than sell house-room to those who want it.”
“Oh, my dear!”
“Bless your dear heart! you’ll think nothing of it, once the lodgers are in the house,” rejoined the girl, kissing her mother’s cheek.
They went down to breakfast: it was a pleasant morning; the sky was a tender blue, and the eastern sunshine shot through the dark limbs of the cedar of Lebanon, and fell in cheerful patches on the floor of the dining-room, and sent a golden shaft across the white breakfast cloth, and sparkled on the silver teapot—the same teapot in which Fanny Pell had once made tea for handsome Tom Grantley in the year 1768. Marion was in high spirits: at all events, she adopted a lightsome tone, in contrast to her usual somewhat grave preoccupation. She was determined to make her mother smile.
“This is our last solitary breakfast,” she declared. “To-morrow morning we shall sit down four to table. There will be a fine old gentleman for me, and a handsome young man for you; for anybody would take you to be the younger of us two. The old gentleman will be impressed with my masculine understanding and knowledge of the world; we shall talk philosophy, and history, and politics; he will finally confess to a more than friendly interest in me; but I shall stop him there, and remind him that, for persons of our age, it is most prudent not to marry. He will allow himself to be persuaded on that point; but he has a vast fortune, and he will secretly make his will
