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Page 11
Some of his conversations with Edith were certainly anything but
encouraging. At other times he felt morally sure that she shared that
derangement of the bivalvular organ technically defined as "a muscular
viscus which is the primary instrument of the blood's motion," whose
worst pains are said to be worth more than the greatest pleasures. He
was very much in earnest, and entirely straightforward, There were no
balancing indecisions now, but the most downright affirmation of
preference. His little speeches were not veiled in rosy clouds of
metaphor and poetry and distant allusions, like Captain Kendall's, nor
did they flow out in an unfailing stream of romantic eloquence, like
that gifted warrior's. They were so honest and so clumsy, indeed, that
Edith could not help laughing at them merrily sometimes, to his great
discomfiture, consisting as they did chiefly of such statements as, "You
know that I am most awfully fond of you. I was tremendously hard hit
from the first. If you don't believe me, you can ask Ramsay. I told him
all about it. You aren't in the least like any other girl that I have
ever known, except Mrs. De Witt a little. I suppose you know that I
would have married her at the dropping of a hat if I could have done so.
But that is all over now. I care an awful lot for you now, and shall be
quite frightfully cut up if you won't have anything to say to me,--I
shall, really. I have got quite wrapped up in you, upon my word. And I
shall be intensely glad and proud if you will consent to be my wife."
When Edith failed to take such speeches as these seriously, poor Mr.
Heathcote was quite beside himself, and, in reply to her bantering
accusations as to his being "a great flirt" and not "really meaning one
word that he said," opposed either burly negation or a deeply-vexed
silence. They looked at so many things differently that they found a
piquant interest in discussing every subject that came up.
"There go May Dunbar and Fred Beach," she said to him one Sunday as they
were coming home from church. "Isn't he handsome? They have been engaged
_three years_. Did you ever hear of such constancy?"
"Do you call that constancy? Why, if a fellow can't wait three years for
a lovely girl like that, he must be a poor stick. Why, my uncle
Montgomery was engaged to his wife seventeen years, while he went out to
India and shook the pagoda-tree, after which he came back, paid all his
father's debts, and they married and went into the house they had picked
out before he sailed," said Mr. Heathcote.
"Good gracious! what a time! I hope the poor things were happy at last.
Were they?" asked Edith.
"H-m--pretty well. He is a rather fiery, tyrannical old party. She
doesn't get her own way to hurt," he replied.
"I have heard that Englishwomen give way to the men in everything and
are always, voluntarily or involuntarily, sacrificed to them. It must be
so bad for both," said Edith sweetly.
"Oh, you go in for woman's rights and that sort of thing, I suppose," he
said, in a tone of annoyance.
"Indeed I don't do anything of the kind," replied she, with warmth. "If
I did, I should be aping the men when I wasn't sneering at them. But I
respect your sex most when they most deserve to be respected, and I
don't see anything to admire in a selfish, tyrannical man that is always
imposing his will, opinions, and wishes upon the ladies of his household
and expects to be the first consideration from the cradle to the grave
because he happens to be a man."
"But he is the head of his house. He ought to get his own way, if
anybody does, and, if he is not a coward, he will, too," said Mr.
Heathcote rather hotly. "Would you have a man a molly-coddle, tied to
his wife's apron-string, and not daring to call his soul his own?"
"Not at all," replied Edith. "It is the cowards that are the tyrants.
'The bravest are the tenderest, the loving are the daring,' as our
American poet says. And women have souls of their own, except in the
East. Why shouldn't _they_ be the first consideration and do as they
please, pray? They are the weaker, the more delicate and daintily bred.
If there is any pampering and spoiling to be done, they should be the
objects of it. And as to rights, there is no divine right of way given
to man, that I know of. I don't believe in that sort of thing at all. Of
course no reasonable woman wants or expects everybody to kootoo before
her and everything to give way to her."
"And no gentleman fails to show a proper respect for his wife's wishes
and comfort, not to mention her happiness," said Mr. Heathcote. "But of
course that sort of thing is only to be found in America. Englishmen are
all selfish, and tyrants, and domestic monsters, I know."
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