‘That’s because you truckle to them.’
‘Ah, set it down a little to my natural charm!’ Ralph sighed.
‘I don’t know anything about your natural charm. If you’ve got any charm it’s quite unnatural. It’s wholly acquired—or at least you’ve tried hard to acquire it, living over here. I don’t say you’ve succeeded. It’s a charm that I don’t appreciate, anyway. Make yourself useful in some way, and then we’ll talk about it.’
‘Well, now, tell me what I shall do,’ said Ralph.
‘Go right home, to begin with.’
‘Yes, I see. And then?’
‘Take right hold of something.’
‘Well, now, what sort of thing?’
‘Anything you please, so long as you take hold. Some new idea, some big work.’
‘Is it very difficult to take hold?’ Ralph enquired.
‘Not if you put your heart into it.’
‘Ah, my heart,’ said Ralph. ‘If it depends upon my heart—!’
‘Haven’t you got a heart?’
‘I had one a few days ago, but I’ve lost it since.’
‘You’re not serious,’ Miss Stackpole remarked; ‘that’s what’s the matter with you.’ But for all this, in a day or two, she again permitted him to fix her attention and on the later occasion assigned a different cause to her mysterious perversity. ‘I know what’s the matter with you, Mr Touchett,’ she said. ‘You think you’re too good to get married.’
‘I thought so till I knew you, Miss Stackpole,’ Ralph answered; ‘and then I suddenly changed my mind.’
‘Oh pshaw!’ Henrietta groaned.
‘Then it seemed to me,’ said Ralph, ‘that I was not good enough.’
‘It would improve you. Besides, it’s your duty.’
‘Ah,’ cried the young man, ‘one has so many duties! Is that a duty too?’
‘Of course it is—did you never know that before? It’s every one’s duty to get married.’
Ralph meditated a moment; he was disappointed. There was something in Miss Stackpole he had begun to like; it seemed to him that if she was not a charming woman she was at least a very good ‘sort’. She was wanting in distinction, but, as Isabel had said, she was brave: she went into cages, she flourished lashes, like a spangled lion-tamer. He had not supposed her to be capable of vulgar arts, but these last words struck him as a false note. When a marriageable young woman urges matrimony on an unencumbered young man the most obvious explanation of her conduct is not the altruistic impulse.
‘Ah, well now, there’s a good deal to be said about that,’ Ralph rejoined.