The satire involved flattery so sweet that Rulledge could not perhaps
wish to make any retort. He frowned sternly, and said, with a face
averted from Minver: "Go on, Wanhope!"

Wanhope here permitted himself a philosophical excursion in which I will
not accompany him. It was apparently to prepare us for the dramatic fact
which followed, and which I suppose he was trying rather to work away
from than work up to. It included some facts which he had failed to
touch on before, and which led to a discussion very interesting in
itself, but of a range too great for the limits I am trying to keep
here. It seems that Alford had been stayed from declaring his love not
only because he doubted of its nature, but also because he questioned
whether a man in his broken health had any right to offer himself to a
woman, and because from a yet finer scruple he hesitated in his poverty
to ask the hand of a rich woman. On the first point, we were pretty well
agreed, but on the second we divided again, especially Rulledge and
Minver, who held, the one, that his hesitation did Alford honor, and
quite relieved him from the imputation of being a chump; and the other
that he was an ass to keep quiet for any such silly reason. Minver
contended that every woman had a right, whether rich or poor, to the man
who loved her; and, moreover, there were now so many rich women that, if
they were not allowed to marry poor men, their chances of marriage were
indefinitely reduced. What better could a widow do with the money she
had inherited from a husband she probably did not love than give it to a
man like Alford--or to an ass like Alford, Minver corrected himself.

His _reductio ad absurdum_ allowed Wanhope to resume with a laugh, and
say that Alford waited at the station in the singleness to which the
tactful dispersion of the others had left him, and watched the train
rapidly dwindle in the perspective, till an abrupt turn of the road