to find a husband, Miss Summerson? Hey, look you! Now you blush!”
I don’t think I did blush—at all events, it was not important if I did—and I said my present fortune perfectly contented me and I had no wish to change it.
“Shall I tell you what I always think of you and the fortune yet to come for you, my love?” said Mrs. Woodcourt.
“If you believe you are a good prophet,” said I.
“Why, then, it is that you will marry someone very rich and very worthy, much older—five and twenty years, perhaps—than yourself. And you will be an excellent wife, and much beloved, and very happy.”
“That is a good fortune,” said I. “But why is it to be mine?”
“My dear,” she returned, “there’s suitability in it—you are so busy, and so neat, and so peculiarly situated altogether that there’s suitability in it, and it will come to pass. And nobody, my love, will congratulate you more sincerely on such a marriage than I shall.”
It was curious that this should make me uncomfortable, but I think it did. I know it did. It made me for some part of that night uncomfortable. I was so ashamed of my folly that I did not like to confess it even to Ada, and that made me more uncomfortable still. I would have given anything not to have been so much in the bright old lady’s confidence if I could have possibly declined it. It gave me the most inconsistent opinions of her. At one time I thought she was a storyteller, and at another time that she was the pink of truth. Now I suspected that she was very cunning, next moment I believed her honest Welsh heart to be perfectly innocent and simple. And after all, what did it matter to me, and why did it matter to me? Why could not I, going up to bed with my