if—” Mary checked herself. She had been carried along as if she had been speaking to Fred instead of Mr.
“Young women are severe: they don’t feel the stress of action as men do, though perhaps I ought to make you an exception there. But you don’t put Fred Vincy on so low a level as that?”
“No, indeed, he has plenty of sense, but I think he would not show it as a clergyman. He would be a piece of professional affectation.”
“Then the answer is quite decided. As a clergyman he could have no hope?”
Mary shook her head.
“But if he braved all the difficulties of getting his bread in some other way—will you give him the support of hope? May he count on winning you?”
“I think Fred ought not to need telling again what I have already said to him,” Mary answered, with a slight resentment in her manner. “I mean that he ought not to put such questions until he has done something worthy, instead of saying that he could do it.”
Mr. Farebrother was silent for a minute or more, and then, as they turned and paused under the shadow of a maple at the end of a grassy walk, said, “I understand that you resist any attempt to fetter you, but either your feeling for Fred Vincy excludes your entertaining another attachment, or it does not: either he may count on your remaining single until he shall have earned your hand, or he may in any case be disappointed. Pardon me, Mary—you know I used to catechise you under that name—but when the state of a woman’s affections touches the happiness of another life—of more lives than one—I think it would be the nobler course for her to be perfectly direct and open.”