Why if not Romeo if I Feel like Romeo?

‘That’s nonsense, Miss Cass, and I shall,’ said Lady Mabel.  They were together on the morning after the little dinner-party described in the last chapter, in a small back sitting-room which was supposed to be Lady Mabel’s own, and the servant had just announced that Mr Tregear was below.

‘Then I shall go down too,’ said Miss Cassewary.

’You’ll do nothing of the kind.  Will you please to tell me what it is you are afraid of?  Do you think that Frank is going to make love to me again?’

‘No.’

’Or that if I chose that he should I would let you stop me?  He is in love with somebody else,—­and perhaps I am too.  And we are two paupers.’

‘My lord would not approve of it.’

’If you know what my lord approves of and he disapproves you understand a great deal better than I do.  And if you mind what he approves or disapproves, you care for his opinion a great deal more than I do.  My cousin is here now to talk to me,—­about his own affairs, and I mean to see him,—­alone.’  Then she left the room, and went down to that in which Frank was waiting for her, without the company of Miss Cassewary.

‘Do you really mean,’ she said, after they had been together for some minutes, ’that you had the courage to ask the Duke for his daughter’s hand?’

‘Why not?’

‘I believe you would dare to do anything.’

‘I couldn’t very well take it without asking him.’

’As I am not acquainted with the young lady I don’t know how that might be.’

‘And if I took her so, I should have to take her empty-handed.’

‘Which wouldn’t suit;—­would it?’

’It wouldn’t suit for her,—­whose comforts and happiness are much more to me than my own.’

‘No doubt!  Of course you are terribly in love.’

‘Very thoroughly in love, I think I am.’

‘For the tenth time, I should say.’

’For the second only.  I don’t regard myself as a monument of constancy, but I think I am less fickle than some other people.’

‘Meaning me?’

‘Not especially.’

’Frank, that is ill-natured, and almost unmanly,—­and false also.  When have been I fickle?  You say that there was one before with you.  I say that thee has never really been one with me at all.  No one knows that better than yourself.  I cannot afford to be in love till I am quite sure that the man is fit to be, and will be, my husband.

’I doubt sometimes whether you are capable of being in love with anyone.’

‘I think I am,’ she said, very gently.  ’But I am at any rate capable of not being in love till I wish it.  Come, Frank, do not quarrel with me.  You know,—­you ought to know,—­that I should have loved you had not been that such love would have been bad for both of us.’

‘It is a kind of self-restraint I do not understand.’

‘Because you are not a woman.’