"Walter has money, mother. With mine added, we shall be quite well off."
"I think, Margaret, if I had been pleading a gentleman's cause, I would not have put him in the invidious light of requiring a wife's fortune to enrich him. It sounds mercenary. Not that I wish to speak unkindly of your friend; but he lays himself open to the suspicion of fortune-hunting, by running after a girl with your prospects. Your uncle is not likely to marry, and you might look so very much higher, if you only had common-sense."
"I don't know where I should look for 'higher.' You have always said that his people were an excellent family in England."
"We are Canadians, my dear. Good connections in England will not help him much with us, unless they are bankers. He is a younger son, and his brother has children, so his prospect of ever coming to the family property is not worth counting. He has got all they can afford to give him, and is a fixture on this side the Atlantic for life."
"He is better off than most young men. Yet see how quickly some of them get on, and rise to the top."
"_He_ will never rise, my dear. He has not been trained for getting on in this country. He will not spend as little as our young men do, and he has not the first idea of how to make a fortune."
"He would not be half as nice if he had."
"My dear, you talk like a child. When people advance into middle life, mere lovemaking grows to be up-hill work. It would be grotesque, if it had not become too insipid for people to attempt keeping it up. The larger interests are needed to make middle life bearable. It is gratifying then to find that one has married a man of note--some one heard of everywhere, and spoken of by everybody. With your looks and accomplishments and prospects, there is no man you may not have the refusal of. How comfortable, when one grows elderly and uninteresting, to be wife of the chief-justice, or of a senator, and receive as much attention in old age as one has been accustomed to in youth! An ex-beauty poorly married is a disappointed and a discontented woman, let me tell you."
"Walter could go into politics if he liked; and if he ever does, he must rise to the top, he is so clever and well informed."