"To me too! I can understand little differences, little whims, caprices: we don't settle into harness for a tap on the shoulder as a man becomes a knight: but to break and bounce away from an unhappy gentleman at the church door is either madness or it's one of the things without a name. You think you are quite sure of yourself?" "I am so sure, that I look back with regret on the time when I was not." "But you were in love with him." "I was mistaken." "No love?" "I have none to give." "Dear me!--Yes, yes, but that tone of sorrowful conviction is often a trick, it's not new: and I know that assumption of plain sense to pass off a monstrosity." Mrs. Mountstuart struck her lap. "Soh! but I've had to rack my brain for it: feminine disgust? You have been hearing imputations of his past life? moral character? No? Circumstances might make him behave unkindly, not unhandsomely: and we have no claim over a man's past, or it's too late to assert it. What is the case?" "We are quite divided." "Nothing in the way of . . . nothing green-eyed?" "Far from that!" "Then name it." "We disagree." "Many a very good agreement is founded on disagreeing. It's to be regretted that you are not portionless. If you had been, you would have made very little of disagreeing. You are just as much bound in honour as if you had the ring on your finger." "In honour! But I appeal to his, I am no wife for him." "But if he insists, you consent?" "I appeal to reason. Is it, madam . . ." "But, I say, if he insists, you consent?" "He will insist upon his own misery as well as mine."