"How do you know that?" I asked, wondering why I was finding it so hard to sympathize with that denuded and deluded English cousin.
"Because I know what's happened to about all of the older families and estates over there," retorted Dinky-Dunk. "The government has pretty well picked them clean."
"Could I see your Cousin Allie's letters?"
"What good would it do?" asked the dour man across the table from me. "The fat's in the fire, and we've got to face the consequences."
"And that's exactly what I've been trying to tell you, you foolish old calvanistic autocrat! We've got to face the consequences, and the only way to do it is to do it the way I've said."
Dinky-Dunk's face softened a little, and he seemed almost ready to smile. But he very quickly clouded up again, just as my own heart clouded up. For I knew, notwithstanding my willingness to deny it, that I was once more acting on impulse, very much as I'd acted on impulse four long years ago in that residuary old horse-hansom in Central Park when I agreed to marry Duncan Argyll McKail before I was even in love with him. But, like most women, I was willing to let Reason step down off the bridge and have Intuition pilot me through the more troubled waters of a life-crisis. For I knew that I was doing the right thing, even though it seemed absurd, even though at first sight it seemed too prodigious a sacrifice, just as I'd done the right thing when in the face of tribal reasoning and logic I'd gone kiting off to a prairie-ranch and a wickiup with a leaky roof. It was a tumble, but it was a tumble into a pansy-bed. And I was thinking that luck would surely be with me a second time, though thought skidded, like a tire on a wet pavement, every time I tried to foresee what this newer change would mean to me and mine.
"You're not going to face another three years of drudgery and shack-dirt," declared Dinky-Dunk, following, oddly enough, my own line of thought. "You went through that once, and once was enough. It's not fair. It's not reasonable. It's not even thinkable. You weren't made for that sort of thing, and--"