Probably the result would, after all, have been nil, had not the
following few remarks been made one day at breakfast.
Her father was in his old hearty spirits. He smiled to himself at
stories too bad to tell, and called Elfride a little scamp for
surreptitiously preserving some blind kittens that ought to have
been drowned. After this expression, she said to him suddenly:
If Mr. Smith had been already in the family, you would not have
been made wretched by discovering he had poor relations?'
'Do you mean in the family by marriage?' he replied inattentively,
and continuing to peel his egg.
The accumulating scarlet told that was her meaning, as much as the
affirmative reply.
'I should have put up with it, no doubt,' Mr. Swancourt observed.
'So that you would not have been driven into hopeless melancholy,
but have made the best of him?'
Elfride's erratic mind had from her youth upwards been constantly
in the habit of perplexing her father by hypothetical questions,
based on absurd conditions. The present seemed to be cast so
precisely in the mould of previous ones that, not being given to
syntheses of circumstances, he answered it with customary
complacency.
'If he were allied to us irretrievably, of course I, or any
sensible man, should accept conditions that could not be altered;
certainly not be hopelessly melancholy about it. I don't believe
anything in the world would make me hopelessly melancholy.
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