"Then you must enter into his game as he enters into it himself. He thinks of himself as doing the big romantic thing. He's marrying a poor girl who has nothing but herself as guaranty. That your great-grandfather was a general and one of the--what did you call them?--Fighting Adares of the County Cork would mean no more to him than if you said you were descended from the Lacedæmonians and the dragon's teeth. As far as that goes, you might as well be an immigrant girl from Sweden; you might as well be a cook. He's stooping to pick up his diamond from the mire, instead of buying it from a jeweler's window. Very well, then, you must let him stoop. You mustn't try to underestimate his condescension. You mustn't tell him you were once in a jeweler's window, and only fell into the mire by chance--" "Because," I smiled, "the mire is where I belong, until I'm taken out of it." "We belong," he stated, judicially, "where the world puts us. If we're wise we'll stay there--till we can meet the world's own terms for getting out." CHAPTER V I come at last to Hugh's defiance of his father. It took place not only without my incitement, but without my knowledge. No one could have been more sick with misgiving than I when I learned that the boy had left his father's house and gone to a hotel. If I was to blame at all it was in mentioning from time to time his condition of dependence. "You haven't the right to defy your father's wishes," I said to him. "so long as you're living on his money. What it comes to is that he pays you to do as he tells you. If you don't do as he tells you, you're not earning your allowance honestly." The point of view was new to him. "But if I was making a living of my own?" "Ah, that would be different." "You'd marry me then?" I considered this. "It would still have to depend," I was obliged to say at last. "Depend on what?" "On the degree to which you made yourself your own master." "I should be my own master if I earned a good income." I admitted this. "Very well," he declared, with decision. "I shall earn it." I didn't question his power to do that. I had heard so much of the American man's ability to make money that I took it for granted, as I did a bird's capacity for flight. As far as Hugh was concerned, it seemed to me more a matter of intention than of opportunity. I reasoned that if he made up his mind to be independent, independent he would be. It would rest with him. It was not of the future I was thinking so much as of the present; and in the present I was chiefly dodging his plea that we settle the matter by taking the law into our own hands. "It won't be as bad as you think," he kept urging. "Father would be sure to come round to you if you were my wife. He never quarrels with the accomplished fact. That's been part of the secret of his success. He'll fight a thing as long as he can; but when it's carried over his head no one knows better than he how to make the best of it."