"You are
utterly resolved?" she asked. "Are you?"
"Utterly."
"Nothing I might say could change your purpose?"
"Nothing."
"No entreaty, howsoever piteous, could move you?"
"None."
Forthwith she urged, entreated, cajoled, commanded, with infinite
prettiness of ingenuity and of eloquence. Never was such a cascade of
dissuasion as hers. She only didn't say she could love him. She never
hinted that. Indeed, throughout her pleading rang this recurrent
motif: that he must live to take to himself as mate some good,
serious, clever woman who would be a not unworthy mother of his
children.
She laid stress on his youth, his great position, his brilliant
attainments, the much he had already achieved, the splendid
possibilities of his future. Though of course she spoke in undertones,
not to be overheard by the throng on the barge, it was almost as
though his health were being floridly proposed at some public banquet
--say, at a Tenants' Dinner. Insomuch that, when she ceased, the Duke
half expected Jellings, his steward, to bob up uttering, with lifted
hands, a stentorian "For-or," and all the company to take up the
chant: "he's--a jolly good fellow.
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