'
'But when everything was against me?'
'One thing was not against you. You ought to have been sure of
that.'
'And so I was. And yet I felt that I ought not to have been sure.
Sometimes, in my solitude, I used to think that I myself had been
wrong. I began to doubt whether under any circumstances I could
have been justified in asking your father's daughter to be my
wife.'
'Because of his rank?'
'Not so much his rank as his money.'
'Ought that to be considered?'
'A poor man who marries a rich woman will always be suspected.'
'Because people are so mean and poor-spirited; and because they
think that money is more than anything else. It should be nothing
at all in such matters. I don't know how it can be anything. They
have been saying that to me all along,--as though one were to stop
to think whether one was rich or poor.' Tregear, when this was
said, could not but remember a time not very much prior to that
which Mary had not stopped to think, neither for a while had he
and Mabel. 'I suppose it was worse for me than for you,' she
added.
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