Chapter 27 150
avarice begin? Last Christmas you were afraid of his marrying me, because it would be imprudent; and now, because he is trying to get a girl with only ten thousand pounds, you want to find out that he is mercenary."
" If you will only tell me what sort of girl Miss King is, I shall know what to think."
" She is a very good kind of girl, I believe. I know no harm of her."
" But he paid her not the smallest attention till her grandfather ' s death made her mistress of this fortune."
" No--what should he? If it were not allowable for him to gain my affections because I had no money, what occasion could there be for making love to a girl whom he did not care about, and who was equally poor?"
" But there seems an indelicacy in directing his attentions towards her so soon after this event."
" A man in distressed circumstances has not time for all those elegant decorums which other people may observe. If she does not object to it, why should we?"
" Her not objecting does not justify him. It only shows her being deficient in something herself--sense or feeling."
" Well," cried Elizabeth, " have it as you choose. He shall be mercenary, and she shall be foolish."
" No, Lizzy, that is what I do not choose. I should be sorry, you know, to think ill of a young man who has lived so long in Derbyshire."
" Oh! if that is all, I have a very poor opinion of young men who live in Derbyshire; and their intimate friends who live in Hertfordshire are not much better. I am sick of them all. Thank Heaven! I am going to-morrow where I shall find a man who has not one agreeable quality, who has neither