"If you think so, it must indeed be dead," he answers, deeply wounded. "Why will you insist on driving me into a corner?" she asks, with the accent of a person rendered irritable by pain. "Why will you force me to make admissions that I don't want to make? What is the good of my owning that I love you still, when I am determined never to marry you?" "_Never to marry me!_" he repeats; unable, in his immense surprise, to do more than say her own words after her. A man is always overwhelmed with astonishment at the idea of any woman not being overjoyed to espouse him. "Never to marry you!" she reiterates, steadily. "I was a bad-enough match for you before--without fortune, position, or connexion; people would have pitied you then for being drawn into such a marriage; but now----" "But now, what?" "But now that I am a _companion_," she continues, with a bitter pride--"an anomalous animal, just two shades higher than the lady's-maid in my own estimation, and probably not that in any one else's--a companion, too, of whom people can say the things that Miss Blessington will say of me now----" "What do you mean? What sort of things _can_ she say?" But Esther maintains a shamed red silence. "That you are completely _passée?_" "No, not that!--that would not concern me much." "That the way you cough in the evening fidgets her to death?" "No, not that." "That you are over-sensitive, as these sort of people always are?" (with a faint mimicking of Miss Blessington's slow languor of articulation). "No, not that." "What then?" "You _must_ remember the things she said; you were there, and it is not more than five hours ago," she answers, with some impatience. "I forget every word she uttered except three." "And what were they?" "You are free." "She did not mean them," says Esther, trying to speak with dispassionate calmness; "she was under an erroneous impression when she said them; she will take you back again." "Take me back again!" he repeats, angrily. "Good heavens, Esther! are you bent on driving me mad? Not satisfied with refusing me point-blank yourself, are you determined to insult me, by forcing upon me a woman for whom, as you know--as you must have known from the first moment you saw us together--I have never felt anything but the profoundest, coldest indifference?" "I meant no insult," she replies, apologetically: "I only meant to say what is true--that _she_ is a suitable match for you--that _she_ is your equal." "Is she?" he retorts ironically. "You are very good, I'm sure; I ask for bread, and you give me a stone. For God's sake, Essie, if you will have nothing to say to me yourself, at least spare me the degradation of listening to your kind and disinterested plans for my welfare!" Under this severe snub, Miss Craven remains silent.