e
asked Suzette Northwick to marry me."

Matt had tried to imagine himself saying this to his mother, and the
effect it would have, ever since he had left Suzette's absorbing
presence; all through his talk with Putney, and all the way home, and
now throughout what he and his mother had been saying of Maxwell and
Louise. But it always seemed impossible, and more and more impossible,
so that when he found the words spoken in his own voice, it seemed
wholly incredible.

XX.

The effect of a thing is never quite what we have forecast. Mrs. Hilary
heard Matt's confession without apparently anything of his tumult in
making it. Women, after all, dwell mainly in the region of the
affections; even the most worldly women have their likes and dislikes,
and the question of the sort Matt had sprung upon his mother, is first a
personal question with them. She was not a very worldly woman; but she
liked her place in the world, and she preferred conformity and
similarity; the people she was born of and bred with, were the nicest
kind of people, and she did not see how any one could differ from them
to advantage. Their ideas were the best, or they would not have had
them; she, herself, did not wish to have other ideas. But her family was
more, far more, to her than her world was. She knew that in his time her
husband had not had the ideas of her world concerning slavery, but she
had always contrived to honor the ideas of both. Since her son had begun
to disagree with her world concerning what he called the industrial
slavery, she contrived, without the sense of inconsistency, to suffer
him and yet remain with the world. She represented in her maternal
tolerance, the principle actuating the church, which includes the facts
as fast as they accomplish themselves, without changing any point of
doctrine.

"Then you mean, Matt," she asked, "that you are going to marry her?"

"Yes," said Matt, "that is what I mean," and then, something in his
mother's way of taking it nettled him on Sue's behalf. "But I don't know
that my marrying her necessarily followed from my asking her. I expected
her to refuse me."

"Men always do; I don't know why," said Mrs. Hilary. "But in this case I
can't imagine it."

"Can't imagine it? _I_ can imagine it!" Matt retorted; but his mother
did not seem to notice his resentment.

"Then, if it's quite settled, you don't wish me to say anything?"

"I wish you to say everything, mother--all that you fe