“Ronnie,” she said meditatively. “Yes, I like Ronnie. Ronnie is a dear.
But—”
“Yes?”
“Ronnie is to play with,” she said. “He’s not for a husband. I should
want my husband to be stronger than that.”
“And then,” I said, quite normal again, “there are other things besides
looks and character. There’s employment, for example. Do you want him
to be rich and idle or do you want him to be busy? And if busy, what do
you want him to do?”
“Yes,” said Rose, “I want him to be busy. I want him to be away all the
day, so that his return will be an event to both of us. I don’t believe
in husbands muddling about at home between breakfast and dinner. I’m
sure father would have been happier if his studio had been somewhere else
and he had to go away to it and remain away. He got tired of the house—I
can see now, although I didn’t know then—instead of looking on it as a
harbour of refuge after his work was done. That’s what made him so
restless and forced him to go away so much: that and his love of seeing
new and beautiful things.
“It must be dreadful,” she mused, “to be an artist and have such a keen
eye for lovely effects and know that they can never be really reproduced
in paint. I wish we knew more about Turner and what he felt. He came
nearer getting it than anyone, I suppose; but he must have suffered
agonies of disappointment and failure. The worst of it is, he seemed
never to let anyone know him, so we have no evidence.”
“Well, don’t go to the opposite extreme,” I said, “and marry a sailor,
for you’d hardly see him at all.”
“Oh no,” she said, “I shouldn’t do that. I should want him to come back
every evening, and stay back.”
“Then no doctor need apply,” I said.
“No, I’m afraid not,” said Rose. “I want all his attention when he has
finished with business. That’s an essential. And a steady home that I
can make like a home, and go on improving. With a big nursery.”
“In the country, or London?” I asked.
“In the country,” said Rose. “But not too far out. A place where you
can hear the train come in, and go a little way across the fields to meet
him and take away the fish basket.”
“Ah!” I said, “now I know. He’s something in the city.”
“I don’t mind if he is,” said Rose, “so long as he comes back every
evening, and loves me, and makes enough money for me to have a hansom
everywhere when I go to town, and to take the children to the sea in the
summer. That’s my idea of a husband.”
“I hope you may find him,” I said, “and having found him, keep him simple
and deeply rooted. And you must make me a promise. Will you?”
“Of course.”
“Let no one but me supply that big nursery with its rocking-horse.”
So we talked; not once but many times. And this Prince Charming in the
guise of a businessman with a tall hat, catching the 9.15 up and the 5.46
down, became a joke with us: one of us at any rate, in the English way,
which avoids facing facts, making haste to joke for fear of having to
cry.
For a while it seemed as though the alarms about the censorious world
were false; but I could rid myself very rarely, and then only for a few
moments, of my fool’s paradise convictions. During the moments that were
free from this haunting, our new united life went along happily. Rose
had taken over the housekeeping by way of experience; we entertained; a
school-fellow came on a visit; we walked over to Mrs. O’Gorman’s fairly
often; there were parties here and there; and no serpent in the form of a
successful lover entered Eden.
I was more than ever struck by Rose’s quiet detachment. She had no
absorbing interests: most things found her ready to scrutinize them, but
nothing captured her. Most young Britons of both sexes have their
hobbies and overwork them, but Rose moved serenely through the days,
getting everything done and apparently having time to turn aside if
occasion called. I admired this gift immensely. My own tendency is to
concentrate almost too exclusively. If she had a hobby it was the
arranging of flowers, and I think that her skill and taste in this
charming and neglected branch of domestic art amounted to genius.
* * * * *
And then, further refusals being no longer possible, Rose accepted an
invitation to her Aunt Stratton’s, and nothing was ever the same again.
O that woman!
I could see that something was wrong directly Rose came back. We were
sufficiently on terms of intimacy for wireless to be established between
us: at any rate from her to me. She did not exactly exhibit constraint,
but there was something, as we say, on her mind. I was conscious of
that. She talked freely enough; gathered up the strings of local life in
her absence; told me something of the Strattons, the only one of whom
that she really cared for being Angelica, the youngest, a girl of about
twelve. Her Uncle George she liked, in a negative way; perhaps, more
accurately, was sorry for. The others we didn’t discuss.
“That’s over anyway,” she said; “and nothing would get me to go abroad
with them. But—” and then she stopped.
I waited for the rest of the sentence, but it never came. Instead, she
asked some question about our own neighbourhood and we passed on to other
interests.
But I guessed then what she was meaning to say and later discovered that
I was right.
“But,”—she was thinking—“although the visit to the Strattons is over, I
shall have to be away a good deal, if not altogether, because it’s not
suitable for Dombeen and me to be alone in this house. People are going
to talk—and I couldn’t allow Dombeen to have to suffer from that.” Such
were her thoughts—the fruit of Milly Stratton’s insinuations. That she
herself would suffer did not matter. Eighteen can look after itself, but
forty-five must be carefully guarded—that is how she would have argued.
Eighteen is too immature, but forty-five, although, of course, an
incredibly advanced age, lends itself to scandal, and doctors must have
sound reputations.
Then set in a broken period which I look back upon without pleasure. All
parents, I suppose, have to go through similar seasons, when
misunderstandings or a want of sympathy alienate them from their
children, or their children from them. During the time of dependence
things can be all right, and again after independence is attained; but
when the wings are beginning to sprout, sons and daughters have it in
them to be more than difficult. How much of it have I seen! I was no
parent myself, and Rose was not pining for independence; but she was
restless and disturbed because of me: she did not want to go away, but
thought that she ought to, knowing that I could not.
At last I could stand it no longer. “Look here, Rose,” I said, “what’s
the matter? You’re not happy. Tell me why.”
“It’s difficult to explain,” she said.
“Then I will,” I said. “You are persuaded that it is unsuitable for us
to be together here alone. Your dear Aunt Milly suggested the idea, and
you can’t forget it. You think people will talk.”
“Oh! Dombeen,” she said, “when did you take to clairvoyance?”
“When your pretty head became transparent,” I replied. “Well, what is to
be done? If you feel like that you must go away—or—”
“Yes—or what?”
“Well, if you were to become engaged I suppose that everybody would be
satisfied and we could go on as we are. Our only saviour is that
punctual husband, with the tall hat and the fish-basket. And he’s not
yet on the horizon.”
“No,” she said.
* * * * *
I soon began to have proofs of the accuracy of the Stratton prediction.
It is extraordinary—especially in a country district where no one in easy
circumstances has enough to do—how intensely interesting the affairs of
other people, neighbours chiefly, can be, and how difficult it is not to
be inquisitive and censorious. I don’t suggest that in a city there are
no meddlesome onlookers, with fingers sharpened for pies that do not
belong to them; but in a city there are more distractions and there are
also certain impediments to familiarity. In the country you are bound,
unless there has been a feud, to know your neighbours; but one may live
at No. 5 in a London terrace for half a century and never meet the
occupants of No. 4 and No. 6.
Hitherto I had been on terms of pleasant and easy intimacy with most of
my patients; and where there was less cordiality it was probably not my
fault. A certain interest in my affairs had been shown—there had been
questions as to my biggest break recently, as to what I was sending to
the Flower Show, the size of marrows, the chance of the Isle of Wight
disease among the hives, and, of course, inquiries after Rose. But no
more. No one had ventured to give advice. But now I began to detect
admonitory symptoms, fumblings towards counsel as to conduct.
Lady Fergusson, for example, Ronnie’s mother, after a long talk about
pelargoniums, wondered if it were true that dear Rose was going to the
Riviera with the Strattons. So nice for her to be with young people. So
nice to be able to go away. It was much to be hoped that nothing would
interfere. How fortunate some girls were! In her youth there had been
no such gadding about. And so forth.
Then the rector’s wife, Mrs. Cumnor, a good enough woman in her way but
overburdened with family cares—not however so overburdened that she had
no time or strength left to take on the cares of others as well: mine and
Rose’s, for instance; she too began to cut in.
Rose, she said one morning, after I had finished with her second
daughter’s pulse, chest and temperature, was, she knew, never ill. How
enviable a state! And so active and clever too. Now that she had
finished with school she would, of course, with such a constitution, go
out into the world.
“Might not her vocation be at home?” I asked.
“Of course it would be hard for you to have to lose her,” Mrs. Cumnor
conceded, “terribly hard; but—” and then she changed the subject.
Her husband, who had clearly been put up by his wife to contribute
something to the campaign, was more jovial about it: wondering if any
young men would dare to propose to a girl who was always in the company
of such a handsome guardian. Was it fair to Rose to have a resident
spoilsport? And so on—with plenty of hearty laughter as an ameliorative.
Mrs. O’Gorman confirmed my fears as to the neighbourhood’s determination.
“The whole pack’s in full cry after you,” she said. “You’re too happy
for them: they can’t bear the sight of it. You’re free too—and so many
of them are shackled for life and full of nasty envy. It’s not the best
possible world! And yet,” she went on, “it’s the only one I want.
Perfection would be very boring.”
“What shall we do?” I asked. “We are beaten.”
“Yes, I’m afraid you’re beaten. The pack has won. But it’s only
anticipating your fate by a few months. All parents have to lose their
children, and you’ve been luckier than most. Rose is certain sure to
marry, and marry young too, so you’d have lost her at twenty any way, if
not before. She’s on the road to nineteen now, and you mustn’t grumble.”
“And what is there left for me?” I asked.
“You?—why that doesn’t matter, because you don’t matter. You’re a
sterile old stick. Sterility has no vote. You’ll just rub along,
getting through the days, till the end. You’ve had your chance and lost
it.”
“You don’t give me much encouragement,” I complained.
“Why should I?” she replied. “The truth is the only thing worth having,
and, in a civilized life, like ours, where so many risks are removed,
facing it is almost the only courageous thing left to do. But you might
marry yet?”
“Never,” I said.
“Very well then, you must rust and bear it.”
Cold comfort indeed!
* * * * *
If ever there were two people on this planet who might have been let
alone, and wanted to be let alone, and deserved to be let alone, they
were Rose and I. But it was not to be.
While with the Strattons, at some “At Home,” Rose had met a Mrs. Lovell,
who was about to go into business as a florist, and she had offered Rose
a post. It was to be a florist’s of a new kind, for not only were
flowers to be sold but they were to be arranged too. The staff was to
include flower-arrangers who on the evenings of dinner-parties would go
out to decorate the tables. Premises had been taken, just off the
Brompton Road, and already a connection was being formed. If Mrs. Lovell
still had room for her, said Rose, she would go. It was not what she had
dreamed of, but it was something definite, a start.
“There is so little for an untrained girl to do,” she said. “It isn’t as
if I was brought up to have to earn my own living. I’m going to be
fairly well off, aren’t I?”
“Fairly,” I said, “when you’re twenty.”
“There you are!” she said. “But at the moment, if I have to go, I should
like to try to be independent. And of course, I have to go,” she added:
“it was cowardly to say ‘if.’ I can’t teach: I don’t know anything. I
can’t type or do shorthand. I don’t want to be a companion to an old
lady—unless it were to Mrs. O’Gorman; but she’s got Julia. But I like
being among flowers, even though they’re cut, and I like Mrs. Lovell, and
I think that’s a Heaven-sent opening. Almost no one arranges flowers as
a profession now. The only one I’ve heard of is a little Japanese man.
So we shall have the field to ourselves. It’s fun to be doing something
original.”
And soon afterwards she went.
Of this part of Rose’s life I have little to say. I can tell only what I
know at first hand. Whenever I was in London—but that was very seldom—I
called at the florist’s; and Rose came down for Sundays now and then.
She seemed to be happy and uncomplicated. Whether her association with
me—whether my general tutelary influence in her earlier years—was being
of any use to her I had no means of judging. She might have been equally
capable without it. Educationalists never know.
The flower scheme failed to prosper, but Rose did not give up London.
Even if there were not the same objection to returning to live with me,
she had probably lost the wish to do so. I am sure that she was fond of
me, but she had made new friends. London was full of variety and
attraction, and she had contracted the habit of employment and liked it.
I don’t know anything about the economics of a florist’s business, except
that to me the thought of having to pay money for flowers is repellent:
flowers, one feels, should be free to all; but Mrs. Lovell had not enough
experience and Rose was quite capable of giving a bunch of daffodils away
rather than haggle over the price. Moreover, the time was not ripe for
the professional arranger. I do not know that it is even yet.
To Mrs. Lovell, however, Rose remained true, and therefore continued with
her as an ally in her next scheme, which was an old curiosity shop. Not
an old curiosity shop where oddity was the prevailing note, but an old
curiosity shop where everything had some beauty, either of shape or
colour, or was picturesquely obsolete. Such shops, I have observed on my
London expeditions, are now very numerous, but Mrs. Lovell’s was one of
the first. They are usually directed by women. Just as a man may sell
wine or be secretary to a golf club and lose no caste, so may what we
call ladies keep these shops. Blue and green and purple glass; old stuff
for patchwork quilts; spinning wheels; Stafford and Leeds jugs; lace;
amber necklaces; beads; brass pestles and mortars; painted rolling-pins;
early Victorian dolls—the place was full of things of that kind, and
Rose, in a charming smock, was standing in the midst of it on the day
that I unexpectedly looked in, smilingly engaged in the task—an easy
one—of selling a very young and obviously adoring curate a warming-pan:
not, as he was explaining, for use, but for decoration. On seeing me she
blushed very becomingly and nearly broke the little divine’s heart by her
too apparent eagerness to turn to the new customer.
Rose begged the afternoon off—and it was the kind of shop that did itself
very little harm by shutting up for the whole day now and then—and we met
for lunch and then loitered about in Kew Gardens.
“Has that little curate proposed to you yet?” I asked.
“Not yet,” said Rose.
“Any one else?”
“One or two,” she replied.
“I suppose a great many men come to that shop?” I said.
“Oh yes. They’re very jolly too, some of them, until they fall in love;
and then they’re so dull. Isn’t it funny what a difference it makes?
And then they propose and I lose them.”
And I, I thought to myself, have lost Rose! Is loss the rule of life?
It seems to be.
* * * * *
It was on one of Rose’s week-end visits just before she was twenty that
she took out a photograph and handed it to me. The photograph was an
amateur snapshot of a group on a lawn, among whom was Rose.
“Quite good of you,” I said.
“No,” she said. “It wasn’t me that I wanted you to look at, but the man
behind me.”
It is strange what effect the most ordinary words can sometimes have!
Rose’s were casual enough, but my heart absolutely stopped for a moment
and a mist crossed my brain. God knows I did not want to keep this child
from marriage; her engagement would even be a blessing in disguise, for
it would bring her back to her home; but her remark none the less was
like a knell.
And yet she had told me nothing! Nothing—and to the fearful swift
apprehension of a jealous foster-father, everything!
I pulled myself together and examined the man: tall, regular-featured,
with a high forehead due more to thinning hair than to formation of
skull. Eyeglasses. His general expression suggested a somewhat
condescending benignity, with assurance. I didn’t like him.
“Who is it?” I asked.
“His name is Eustace Holt,” Rose said. “He wants me to marry him.”
“Yes?” I heard my voice say.
“I rather think I shall.”
I had no more words. I drew her to me and kissed her hair. The action,
I suppose, implied a kind of possessive protectiveness. I had wondered
vaguely how I should behave when the news broke: and this was the way!
After a long silence Rose went on to say that he was a barrister; had
been a private tutor for a while after leaving Oxford, but was now at the
Bar and beginning to do well in chamber practice. Not an advocate.
I looked at the photograph again. Probably I should have been cool about
any young man who had captured Rose’s heart, knowing so well that none
could be worthy; but to this one I felt positive hostility. He had the
effect of filling me with a sudden warm rush of affection for Ronnie.
“Well?” Rose said.
She knew me sufficiently to discern a want of sympathy; but I hope that I
succeeded in concealing the greater part of my antagonism. You see, I
was still a liar. Not all my intimacy with Rose and admiration for her
candour had cured me. Perhaps had I said, “My dear, I hate the sight of
the man: he looks priggish: do promise me to do nothing about it for six
months,” it might have changed her life. At any rate it could have done
no harm, and it would have had the additional merit of expressing a
truth. But I couldn’t. For one thing, I had not the courage to be
destructive about her own choice, when the romance was still so young;
for another, I had not the right. She had seen the man and loved the
man, or thought she did; and all the ground for my sudden prejudice was a
tiny snapshot.
“Well?” said Rose.
“He’s not what I was expecting for you or hoping for you,” I replied.
“At any rate, not in appearance. He’s—well, he’s too—too urban. Too
prim. In spite of what I said about the fish-basket, I have always
thought of your husband as more careless, easy-going, gayer than this. I
had thought of him as having something of Nature—more of the open air or
the sea—but this man’s from the Squares. He travels in the Tube. He
carries an umbrella.”
“My dear Dombeen,” said Rose, “how can you know things like that? I’m
sure I don’t, and I’ve seen quite a lot of him. He may be a Londoner,
but that’s nothing. Barristers must live in London. I wish I hadn’t
shown you that foolish picture. He’s really very distinguished looking,
he has a most delightful voice, he does everything well. He’s a plus man
at golf.”
“I can believe it,” I said. “But that isn’t the point. The point is
not, is he a remarkable man, but is he fitted to be Rose’s husband? I’ve
known you for as many years as you have been on this earth, and I’ve
watched you grow up in body and mind, and perhaps I’ve been able to help
you in both—and when we help people we learn about them—and I’ve thought
often of the best kind of man to carry you away from me when the time
came, but never was it a polished Londoner marked out for professional
eminence. Where—just to mention one trifling matter—where are his
jokes?”
“Jokes aren’t everything. But any way he can be quite amusing.”
“Jokes go a long way,” I said; “and you especially would be very dull
without them. As for his golf, that’s nothing. Golf isn’t really a
game, nor does it really carry any open-air love with it. How old is
he?”
“He’s thirty-four,” said Rose.
“Thirty-four, thinning at the top, once a tutor, now a barrister, and
going to marry this uncalculating child! O my dear!” I said.
* * * * *
It was of course absurd of me to be shocked by Rose’s choice of a
husband. I suppose that there never was a girl yet whose selection did
not cause surprise. The strange thing to male observers of these matches
is the want of fastidiousness that even the nicest women can display.
Rose had not erred in that respect, but it is notorious among men that
most women do.
I took my disappointment to Mrs. O’Gorman, but she had no sympathy for
me. All that she did was to laugh.
“I told you so,” she said.
“How can you be so elementary as to make use of that paltry phrase?” I
replied.
She laughed again.
“Didn’t I tell you so?” she asked. “Years ago. And often since.”
“I suppose you did,” I conceded.
“Very well then, let a poor lonely old woman full of uric acid, with an
extremely incompetent medical adviser, enjoy her little triumph! If poor
human nature couldn’t say ‘I told you so’ now and then, we’d hardly have
the courage to keep on at all at all.”
“Very well then,” I said. “You are one of the most remarkable of
far-sighted women. Deborah the prophetess was a blind mute compared with
you; Mother Shipton was an Aunt Sally. I give you all the praise and
glory. But meanwhile, what is to be done? I’m sure that Rose is making
a mistake.”
“Most people who marry do,” said this monstrous old woman.
“Then can’t it be stopped?” I asked.
“I don’t see how. Surely you’ve heard the remark—I’m not very original
this afternoon, I’m afraid—’Marriage is a lottery’?”
“Well?”
“Well, then there’s nothing for you to do. It may be all right. You say
that he’s respectable, a barrister, not poor, not deformed. How then can
you stop it? You’ve got nothing to go on, no valid excuse. If he were a
dwarf you might do something; or a tenor with long hair. But I don’t see
how you could stop her even then, because in marriage the promising
matches often go wrong and the apparently ill-assorted have a very good
time. Besides, she’s only a few months from being her own mistress. You
can grumble, but you can’t prevent.”
And that’s all the comfort that I got from Mrs. O’Gorman.
* * * * *
But there was one drop of sweetness in this bitter draught. Rose’s
engagement meant that she returned to me; she gave up her work almost at
once.
Nothing, however, was as it had been. (Nothing, says the cynic, ever
is.) Our old frank intimacy was over. We had our talks and our walks
and our fun still; but there was a skeleton at the feast, and he was a
rising barrister. Rose didn’t mention him much, nor did I. But she
wrote long letters, and received long letters, and I had no doubt that
Eustace Holt received those that she wrote and signed those that she
received. And then one evening she suggested that he should be asked
down.
“You’ll have to see him sooner or later,” she added.
“Then it’s still on?” I inquired.
“Of course,” said Rose. “I should have told you if it hadn’t been. When
you meet him you’ll like him. Or you would if you hadn’t made up your
mind not to, and haven’t got the pluck to eat humble pie.”
I never liked him, but it would have been difficult to say why. He was
tall, comely, well-mannered, deferential, thoughtful about details,
protective of Rose (perhaps that was his real offence), uniformly quiet
and easy. What he lacked most conspicuously was any exaggerated
characteristic. He conversed fluently and with some knowledge upon all
the cultured topics—he knew about pictures and music, as a frequenter of
the National Gallery and the Crystal Palace concerts; he belonged to the
London Library; he played golf at the Old Deer Park; he had good nails.
He dressed well. His suit case was of the solidest leather. In fact, he
was all that he should have been and—alas!—nothing that he should not.
He reminded me of a well-bound book in a gentleman’s library—the kind of
book that no gentleman’s library should be without, but which makes no
appeal to be read.
I am not one of those who fling up their hands in despair and wonder what
on earth a sensible girl like So-and-So can see in that fellow she’s
going to marry. But even when one admits that the deeps that call to
deeps in engaged people are and should be invisible to the rest of the
world, it is permissible to parents and guardians to deplore the
reciprocity. The deeps are not all: in fact the attraction of the deeps
can be the least permanent and admirable element in marriage.
I knew enough of Rose’s spirit, her vividness, her dependence upon
impulse, her love of life, to realize that she was doomed to spend far
too much time alone. Eustace had all the virtues, but he had no
imagination. He was also fixed where Rose was fluid. He had his eye on
the goal success; whereas all that Rose asked from life was a gay
serenity. She was in the habit of watching faces light up at her
approach: “People,” you might have written on her tombstone as sufficient
epitaph, “were pleased to see her”; and all of that was doomed to pass,
not because she would be less liked but because she would not be free:
she was to be reincarnated as the property of another, as Mrs. Eustace
Holt.
Still, there is more than one kind of happiness; there is even, I have
observed, a happiness to be derived from misery: all doctors would
testify to this; and Rose might find, in her home duties and the practice
of wifeliness, a complacency that would take the place of the old
radiating freedom. I use the word “might” with emphasis: it is all that
is possible to parents and guardians who are threatened with the loss of
their treasure and have gloomy prevision.
In my case I was truly hoping against hope, because I had had a shock.
On one of Eustace’s visits I made a discovery about him which filled me
with the darkest forebodings. I had found him one afternoon just before
post time seated in the library steaming a stamp off a postcard. Rose,
it appears, had had occasion to write a rapid order to some shop and,
having no halfpenny stamp (for those were the days before the blessings
of peace had sent up the postcard rate), she had characteristically stuck
on a twopenny-halfpenny one from a store which I kept for foreign
correspondence; and Eustace had been entrusted with the card for the
post. But his careful eye had detected the extravagance, and when I came
upon him he was removing the twopenny-halfpenny stamp and substituting a
halfpenny one from his own pocket. Knowing Rose as I did, I would rather
have found him burgling my safe or even kissing one of the maids; for the
action argued a passion for thrift which would lead in time to the
sternest censure of the unthinking carelessness in money matters and the
constant generosities which were among her most striking characteristics.
The worst of it was that he did not pale or start when I caught him: he
merely expressed his satisfaction at having been able to correct Rose’s
folly in time. He then dried the foreign stamp, handed it gravely to me
for future use (“It will need a little gum,” he said) and hastened to the
post. If ever a home-wrecker was saturated with innocence it was he.
* * * * *
I was in hopes that Rose’s formal visit to Eustace’s people might have
the effect of implanting some misgivings in her. Such expeditions have
had that effect in the past, when the impact of the “people” has been so
startling as to cause a complete revision of the affections. But not so
in Rose’s case, and she came back still an engaged woman. (By the way, I
did not approve of the ring which Eustace had given her: it was not the
superlatively beautiful thing that she ought to have had. Rose should
have had some great noble stone in an invisible setting—a ruby or an
emerald—but Eustace had chosen and sent her a muddle of little pearls and
diamonds.)
Eustace’s father was a clergyman in Berkshire, a rather querulous man,
Rose said, but hospitable and kindly to her. Mrs. Holt was more
difficult. “But then,” Rose added, “mothers always must be critical of
their future daughters-in-law. No girl can be good enough for their
darling sons!”
Eustace being the only son, the mother was, of course, additionally hard
to please.
“How did you leave her?” I asked.
“Resigned rather than rapturous,” said Rose. “I did nothing very
terrible, but I fancy that she suspects you as a trainer of youth.”
“Not so much as I suspect her,” I said, “as a judge of brides.”
The whole thing infuriated me.
Another cause of vexation at this time was Mrs. O’Gorman.
We are annoyed when our old friends like our new friends too much; but we
are even more annoyed when our old friends refuse to share our
antipathies to new acquaintances. Mrs. O’Gorman disappointed me deeply
by not finding Eustace as unsuitable as I did. Perhaps she was only
being wilfully provocative, but the effect on me was the same.
“A very intelligent old lady,” Eustace called her, to me. Perhaps a
little too outspoken, a little lacking in taste. But very refreshing. A
character, in fact. No one enjoyed studying a character more than he.
And there were so few of them!
I have just said that few things are more annoying than an old friend’s
approval of a new acquaintance that we dislike. But I think that to hear
an old friend patronizingly appraised by an incompetent critic is almost
worse. Mrs. O’Gorman was a character: there was no doubt about that; but
Eustace had only a glimmering of that fact.
My peace of mind was further impaired by Rose’s tendency to play with the
joke that I also must marry. It was not a new idea; but hitherto she had
been very light with me.
“What we must do, Dombeen,” she had said to me one day not long after her
decision to go to London to Mrs. Lovell, “is to get you settled.”
“What on earth do you mean?” I had asked.
“A wife,” she said, laughing. “You mustn’t be left all alone.”
“I like being alone,” I said: “that is, when you’re not here.”
“But you ought to marry,” Rose said. “Every one says so.”
“Who says so?”
“Well, Mrs. Cumnor says so.”
“I don’t pay any attention to the wives of the clergy,” I replied.
“Aunt Milly says so.”
“Oh, Aunt Milly! Of course. She has never wished me anything but ill.”
“I should feel much happier in London if I thought you were not alone,”
Rose said.
“That’s absurd,” I replied. “You were not unhappy at school, and I was
alone then.”
But now Rose went on to select actual wives! I used to wonder what she
really thought about it all, but never discovered. It was not like her
to be so persistent with a theme. She usually touched and passed on.
Could it be that we were out of harmony in graver matters, and she jested
to keep free of them?
She would come back to lunch, after being in the village, with new and
fantastic plans for my marriage. Every spinster and widow within a five
mile radius was weighed as a possible Mrs. Greville. Rose dismissed Mrs.
O’Gorman as too old, but her faithful Julia came under the lens.
“But no,” she was kind enough to say, “I couldn’t let you marry her. A
woman must have some spirit.”
Three unmarried sisters—the Misses Sturgis—had recently taken the
Allinsons’ old house—after one or two fleeting and unattractive tenants.
Rose saw a good deal of them just now, and I was on more or less familiar
terms both as a doctor and a neighbour.
The sisters, who were refined and affluent, had been brought up as
Quakers, but they quaked no more nor did they harbour any resentment
against our “steeple-house”; they had become indeed useful members of the
congregation, receiving from the rector the preferential treatment meted
out to this particular sect even when it retains its nonconformity.
Rose was never tired of analysing each—Miss Sturgis, Miss Hester and Miss
Honor—as a possible wife for me.
“I was looking at Hester Sturgis again this morning,” she said. “Really
she’s very nice. She has very pretty hair, don’t you think? She is
writing an essay on Walter Pater for the next meeting of the Lowcester
Literary Society. She particularly hoped that you wouldn’t be there,
Dombeen. She says you’re so critical, she’d be terrified.”