“You do not want me to marry,” said the sensible girl, “and I don’t think I wish it either, papa. But if I ever did, it would not be nice to have to go and ask all these people; and they never would agree. We might be quite sure of that.”
“Then you think I have been hard upon you? Always speak to me quite openly, Lucy. I don’t want to be hard upon you, my child--quite the other way.”
“Oh, it does not matter at all,” said Lucy, cheerfully, plying her knitting-needles. “I don’t think it is the least likely that I shall ever want to marry. As you have always told me, I shall have plenty to do, and there will be Jock,” she added, after a momentary pause.
“You have a great many prejudices about Jock,” her father said, testily: “what difference can he make? He has not so very much to do with you, and he will be in quite a different sphere.”
“Do you want me to have nobody belonging to me?” Lucy cried, with a sudden vivacity not without indignation in it, then subdued herself as suddenly. “It doesn’t at all matter,” she said.
“And you remember,” said her father almost humbly, “this is only till you are five-and-twenty. It is not for all eternity; you will have plenty of time to marry, or do whatever you please, after that.”
Lucy nodded and smiled once more. “I don’t think I shall want to marry,” she said; but while she spoke she was making a quiet calculation of quite a different character. “Jock is eight and I am seventeen,” she was saying within herself, “how old will Jock be when I am twenty-five?” It does not seem a difficult question; but she was not great in arithmetic, and it took her a moment or two to make it out. When she had succeeded her face brightened up. “Still young enough to be educated,” she added, always within herself, and this quite restored her patience and her cheerfulness.
“It will be very funny,” she said, “to see the rector and Mr. Williamson consulting together. I wonder how they will begin; I am sure Mr. Williamson will put on colored clothes to show how independent he is; and the doctor--the doctor will smile and rub his hands.”
“You forget,” said old Trevor, with a slight sharpness of tone, though he laughed, “that such things have been as that I should outlive the doctor. He’s younger than I am, to be sure, but I would not have you to calculate on my death before the doctor. It might be quite a different rector. It might be a young man that would, perhaps, put in claims to the heiress himself. But I’ll give you one piece of advice, Lucy, beforehand. Never marry a parson. They’re always in the way. Other kinds of men have their occupations; but a parson with a rich wife is always lounging about. Your mother used to say so; and she was a very sensible woman. She had an offer from one of the chapel ministers when she was young; but she would have nothing to say to him. A man in slippers, always indoors, was what she never could abide.”