This marriage must not come off. It was contrary to almost
every instinct of one who was practical not only by character, but
by habit of life and training. Her warm and full-blooded nature had
a sneaking sympathy with love and pleasure, and had she not been
practical, she might have found this side of her a serious drawback
to the main tenor of a life so much in view of the public eye. Her
consciousness of this danger in her own case made her extremely alive
to the risks of an undesirable connection--especially if it were a
marriage--to any public man. At the same time the mother-heart in her
was stirred. Eustace had never been so deep in her affection as Bertie,
still he was her first-born; and in face of news which meant that he
was lost to her--for this must indeed be 'the marriage of two minds' (or
whatever that quotation was)--she felt strangely jealous of a woman, who
had won her son's love, when she herself had never won it. The aching of
this jealousy gave her face for a moment almost a spiritual expression,
then passed away into impatience. Why should he marry her? Things could
be arranged. People spoke of it already as an illicit relationship; well
then, let people have what they had invented. If the worst came to the
worst, this was not the only constituency in England; and a dissolution
could not be far off.
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