But she persisted without heat. “What we’ve set our hearts on is working for England.”
“And pray who in the world’s ‘England,’” he cried in his stupefaction, “unless I am?”
“Dear, dear father,” she pleaded, “that’s all we want you to be! I mean”—she didn’t fear firmly to force it home—“in the real, the right, the grand sense; the sense that, you see, is so intensely ours.”
“‘Ours’?”—he couldn’t but again throw back her word at her. “Isn’t it, damn you, just in ours—?”
“No, no,” she interrupted—“not in ours!” She smiled at him still, though it was strained, as if he really ought to perceive.
But he glared as at a senseless juggle. “What and who the devil are you talking about? What are ‘we,’ the whole blest lot of us, pray, but the best and most English thing in the country: people walking—and riding!—straight; doing, disinterestedly, most of the difficult and all the thankless jobs; minding their own business, above all, and expecting others to mind theirs?” So he let her “have” the stout sound truth, as it were—and so the direct force of it clearly might, by his view, have made her reel. “You and I, my lady, and your two decent brothers, God be thanked for them, and mine into the bargain, and all the rest, the jolly lot of us, take us together—make us numerous enough without any foreign aid or mixture: if that’s what I understand you to mean!”
“You don’t understand me at all—evidently; and above all I see you don’t want to!” she had the bravery to add, “By ‘our’ sense of what’s due to the nation in such a case I mean Mr. Crimble’s and mine—and nobody’s else at all; since, as I tell you, it’s only with him I’ve talked.”
It gave him then, every inch of him showed, the full, the grotesque measure of the scandal he faced. “So that ‘you and Mr. Crimble’ represent the standard, for me, in your opinion, of the proprieties and duties of our house?”
Well, she was too earnest—as she clearly wished to let him see—to mind his perversion of it. “I express to you the way we feel.”
“It’s most striking to hear, certainly, what you express”—he had positively to laugh for it; “and you speak of him, with your insufferable ‘we,’ as if you were presenting him as your—God knows what! You’ve enjoyed a large exchange of ideas, I gather, to have arrived at such unanimity.” And then, as if to fall into no trap he might somehow be laying for her, she dropped all eagerness and rebutted nothing: “You must see a great deal of your fellow-critic not to be able to speak of yourself without him!”