“Women,” such boors remark, “are unreasonable enough when one wants to reason with them, but when it comes to other matters (as needs it must, if health and good spirits are to retain their seat), then up springs this same forgotten reason, like a garden rake one treads on when picking flowers, and hits you on the nose.”

Beside such scurrilities, Amy’s words stand arrayed in sweetness and light, except for the trifling fault, since nothing can be absolutely perfect, of being a little insincere. It is extremely difficult for a tenderly nurtured young woman of our race and generation, especially one who is diligent in keeping abreast of contemporary science, to say in so many words, “I like nothing more than being wooed, and nothing less than the prospect of being won,” and this must be the reason that so few say it, while so many evince that attitude very clearly in their behavior. Not, indeed, that this is true of every woman, or that there is really a lack of healthy physical instinct among the cultivated shes of today. On the contrary, there is an ample sufficiency, the only trifling criticism to be advanced being connected with the distribution of it, for half, like Amy, have none at all, and the other half have perhaps twice too much.

But, be that as it may, the fact remains that Amy expressed herself thus, and Mr. Fatigay, when he had well pondered her words, began to shake and tremble at the prospect of delay, as if he had been sentenced to a second turn on the rack, and, getting up from the pouf, he took a fling or two about the room.

“Amy!” he cried at last, “Heaven knows I am unwilling to pester you, as you call it, and still more so to obtrude on your notice that side of my nature which your purer one finds so repellent. Do understand! I am not incapable of the higher sort of love which you rightly require of me, but, in spite of that, I am, in short, a man. And if, so to speak, I am repressed much longer, I fear I shall become totally unhinged, and perform, in some awful aberration, a desperate act, which, when you hear of it, will make you hate and shun me. Have pity, therefore, on what is, after all, only the agonizing nature of my sex.”

“It may well be the nature of your sex,” said she, “in animals and in those men who are nothing more. Doubtless the monkey that sits there could bear you out in that. But I cannot think that any true man, least of all you, Alfred, to whom I have given so much, could be so utterly lacking in self-control. Why, George Weeke,” she said, “was engaged five years to Adeline Chili, and . . .” But at the sound of these names, which were not unfamiliar to him, Mr. Fatigay uttered a strange sound.

“I see,” went on Amy, with some asperity, for she could not bear to hear her friends disparaged, “I see that I am right in resolving to know you more certainly before I entrust my life into your keeping. And if you are that sort of man, who puts that before everything else, it surely cannot matter whom you marry. You had better think very seriously before you tie yourself to one who has a life of her own to lead, and can’t put that thing first in importance.”

Hearing these words, Mr. Fatigay was very cast down, for to him Miss Amy Flint was the way and the life, and what disagreed with her least opinion, though it might be the very foundation stone of his being, was not long in appearing to him as both inferior and offensive.

But Emily, on hearing this admonition to him to take thought, could have sprung from her seat, and, going up to Amy, have shaken her warmly by the hand, for she had no idea of the process which fishermen describe in the phrase, “giving him line.”

Mr. Fatigay went to the window and watched the dark and rainy wind shake angrily at the numb bewildered boughs, which might have expected by this time to be flecked with translucent green. “The buds,” he thought, “seem actually to be retreating.”

As she saw him standing there so dismally, drooping in the sudden vacuity of a complete non plus, staring at the windowpanes, which, piteous with the cold trickle of raindrops, seemed a fitting mirror for his suddenly colorless and weeping soul, Emily thought to herself, “This pain of his, though it throbs at my heart’s root, is perhaps all for the best. Amy spoke the truth, and for better reason than she knew. This deluded ardor of his, the monstrous product of five years’ incubation in loneliness under the African sun, must soon dwindle and disappear now it is brought face to face with so manifestly disproportionate an object. While it continues, my master must value this woman’s qualities as the highest, which means that his standards must be in utter chaos. But when the bubble is pricked by some word too sharp or prospect too thorny, they will reassert themselves, and he will realize that it is best to give his heart where the warmest return is to be expected. And then . . . Who knows?

“Perhaps he is on the point of revolt now,” she continued. “He has reason enough, I am sure. Or perhaps he must have time to see something of normal women before he regains his mental balance.”

For poor Emily, in her innocence, believed Amy to be a very chimera of wrath and treachery and greed, and all because she knew how to stand up for herself and was not disposed to be treated as a mere chattel. She thought of her as a cold-blooded variety of that terrible ‘woman of thirty’, whom she regarded as an apocalyptic monster, absolutely transgressing all that Tennyson and the loving heart laid down as beautiful and good.