“You can say that--you can talk about marrying another man before two months have passed! I’m ashamed of you.” At first she did not know what he meant by his reference to two months--two months’ since what? Then all at once it flashed upon her that he had in his mind the incident that should have been appropriately commemorated (according to his idea) by widow’s weeds. “I think that we had better not return to that particular matter,” she said. “We can never look at it from the same standpoint. I married once to please you and my mother; I will marry now to please myself.” “Decency is decency, all the same, whatever your notions may be,” said he. “No daughter of mine with my consent will become engaged to a man so as to outrage every sense of decency. A year is the very shortest space of time that must elapse--even a year is too short for good taste.” “A year and more has passed since you gave me to that man--the man you choose for me--a year since I outraged a sense that is very much higher than your sense of decency by promising to honour a wretch who was trying to accomplish my dishonour.” “What do you mean, Priscilla? Didn’t he marry you honestly in the church? Give the man his due. I doubt if this young Wingfield’s intentions are so honourable.” She rose from the table saying: “I will talk no more to you on this subject, father. I thought that after my year of suffering--oh, my God! what I suffered! And you could look on and know nothing of it! Was ever a girl plunged as I was into such a seven-times-heated furnace of shame? Was it nothing to me, do you think, to walk in the street and see women nudge one another as I came up--to see myself pointed out to strangers and to hear them mutter ‘Poor thing!’ or ‘What a pity she made such a fool of herself!’--to have it set down to me that I was a girl so anxious to find a husband that I jumped at the first man that offered, without making the least enquiry as to his character? I told you that when that man wrote to you for your consent--he was so scrupulous, you know, he would do nothing without your consent--I told you that I disliked him--that I distrusted him--that I could never be happy with him, and yet you put me aside as if I were not worthy of a moment’s consideration--you put my opinion aside and urged on my poor mother to make her appeal to me, the consequences of which killed her. With all that fresh in your mind--with some knowledge at least of what my sufferings for that horrible year must have been--feeling my life ruined--linked for ever to that man’s handcuffs--in spite of all this you can still question my right to choose for myself--you can still insult both me and the man whom I have promised to marry! That being so we would do well not to talk any further on this topic.”