"Perhaps it would be thought rather intimate. People don't like to talk
of such things."
"They're ashamed," Minver declared. "The lovers don't either of them, in
a given case, like to let others know how much the woman had to do with
making the offer, and how little the man."
Minver's point provoked both Wanhope and myself to begin a remark at the
same time. We begged each other's pardon, and Wanhope insisted that I
should go on.
"Oh, merely this," I said. "I don't think they're so much ashamed as
that they have forgotten the different stages. You were going to say--?"
"Very much what you said. It's astonishing how people forget the vital
things and remember trifles. Or perhaps as we advance from stage to
stage what once seemed the vital things turn to trifles. Nothing can be
more vital in the history of a man and a woman than how they became
husband and wife, and yet not merely the details, but the main fact,
would seem to escape record if not recollection. The next generations
knows nothing of it."
"That appears to let Acton out," Minver said. "But how do _you_ know
what you were saying, Wanhope?"
"I've ventured to make some inquiries in that region at one time. Not
directly, of course. At second and third hand. It isn't inconceivable,
if we conceive of a life after this, that a man should forget, in its
more important interests and occupations, just how he quitted this
world, or at least the particulars of the article of death. Of course,
we must suppose a good portion of eternity to have elapsed." Wanhope
continued, dreamily, with a deep breath almost equivalent to something
so unscientific as a sigh: "Women are charming, and in nothing more
than the perpetual challenge they form for us. They are born defying us
to match ourselves with them."
"Do you mean that Miss Hazelwood--" Rulledge began, but Minver's laugh
arrested him.
"Nothing so concrete, I'm afraid," Wanhope gently returned. "I mean, to
match them in graciousness, in loveliness, in all the agile contests of
spirit and plays of fancy. It's pathetic to see them caught up into
something more serious in that other game, which they are so good at."
"They seem rather to like it, though, some of them, if you mean the game
of love," Minver said. "Especially when they're not in earnest about
it."
"Oh, there are plenty of spoiled women," Wanhope admitted. "But I don't
mean flirting. I suppose that the average unspoiled woman is rather
frightened than otherwise when she knows that a man is in love with
her."
"Do you suppose she always knows it first?" Rulledge asked.
"You may be sure," Minver answered for Wanhope, "that if she didn't know
it, _he_ never would." Then Wanhope answered for himself:
"I think that generally she sees it coming. In that sort of wireless
telegraphy, that reaching out of two natures through space towards each
other, her more sensitive apparatus probably feels the appeal of his
before he is conscious of having made any appeal."
"And her first impulse is to escape the appeal?" I suggested.
"Yes," Wanhope admitted, after a thoughtful reluctance.
"Even when she is half aware of having invited it?"
"If she is not spoiled she is never aware of having invited it. Take
the case in point; we won't mention any names. She is sailing through
time, through youthful space, with her electrical lures, the natural
equipment of every charming woman, all out, and suddenly, somewhere from
the unknown, she feels the shock of a response in the gulfs of air where
there had been no life before. But she can't be said to have knowingly
searched the void for any presence."
"Oh, I'm not sure about that, Professor," Minver put in. "Go a little
slower, if you expect me to follow you."
"It's all a mystery, the most beautiful mystery of life," Wanhope
resumed. "I don't believe I could make out the case as I feel it to be."
"Braybridge's part of the case is rather plain, isn't it?" I invited
him.
"I'm not sure of that. No man's part of any case is plain, if you look
at it carefully. The most that you can say of Braybridge is that he is
rather a simple nature. But nothing," the psychologist added, with one
of his deep breaths, "is so complex as a simple nature."
"Well," Minver contended, "Braybridge is plain, if his case isn't."
"Plain? Is he plain?" Wanhope asked, as if asking himself.
"My dear fellow, you agnostics doubt everything!"
"I should have said picturesque. Picturesque, with the sort of
unbeautifulness that takes the fancy of women more than Greek
proportion. I think it would require a girl peculiarly feminine to feel
the attraction of such a man--the fascination of his being grizzled and
slovenly and rugged. She would have to be rather a wild, shy girl to do
that, and it would have to be through her fear of him that she would
divine his fear of her. But what I have heard is that they met under
rather exceptional circumstances. It was at a house in the Adirondacks,
where Braybridge was, somewhat in the quality of a bull in a china-shop.
He was lugged in by the host, as an old friend, and was suffered by the
hostess as a friend quite too old for her. At any rate, as I heard (and
I don't vouch for the facts, all of them), Braybridge found himself at
odds with the gay young people who made up the hostess's end of the
party, and was watching for a chance to--"