"We did not think it necessary to prove our love—and I don't think we should have allowed anybody else to prove it—by a long probation, Kingscote."
"My darling, we were different," he said, promptly.
She did not ask him to explain wherein they were different, he and she, who had met for the first time less than four months ago; she shared the usual unconscious prejudice that we all have in favour of our own sincerity and trustworthiness, and wisdom and foresight, and assumed as a matter of course that their case was an exceptional one. Still she had faith in others as well as in herself and her second self.
"I know Patty," she said, laying her hair brush on her knee and looking with solemn earnestness into her husband's rough-hewn but impressive face—a face that seemed to her to contain every element of noble manhood, and that would have been weakened and spoiled by mere superficial beauty—"I know Patty, Kingscote, better than anyone knows her except herself. She is like a little briar rose—sweet and tender if you are gentle and sympathetic with her, but certain to prick if you handle her roughly. And so strong in the stem—so tough and strong—that you cannot root her out or twist her any way that she doesn't feel naturally inclined to grow—not if you use all your power to make her."
"Poor little Patty!" he said, smiling. "That is a very pathetic image of her. But I don't like to figure in your parable as the blind genius of brute force—a horny-handed hedger and ditcher with a smock frock and a bill-hook. I am quite capable of feeling the beauty, and understanding the moral qualities of a wild rose—at least, I thought I was. Perhaps I am mistaken. Tell me what you would do, if you were in my place?"
Elizabeth slipped from her chair and down upon her knees beside him, with her long hair and her long dressing-gown flowing about her, and laid her head where it was glad of any excuse to be laid—a locality at this moment indicated by the polished and unyielding surface of his starched shirt front. "You know I never likened you to a hedger and ditcher," she said, fondly. "No one is so wise and thoughtful and far-sighted as you. It is only that you don't know Patty quite yet—you will do soon—and what might be the perfect management of such a crisis in another girl's affairs is likely not to succeed with her—just simply and only for the reason that she is a little peculiar, and you have not yet had time to learn that."
"It is time that I should learn," he said, lifting her into a restful position and settling himself for a comfortable talk. "Tell me what you think and know yourself, and what, in your judgment, it would be best to do."
"In my judgment, then, it would be best," said Elizabeth, brief interval given up to the enjoyment of a wordless tête-à-tête, "to let Patty and Paul be together a little before they part. For this reason—that they will be together, whether they are let or not. Isn't it preferable to make concessions before they are ignominiously extorted from you? And if Patty has much longer to bear seeing her lover, as she thinks, humiliated and insulted, by being ignored as her lover in this house, she will go to the other extreme—she will go away from us to him—by way of making up to him for it. It is like what you say of the smouldering, poverty-bred anarchy in your European national life—that if you don't find a vent for the accumulating electricity generating in the human sewer—how do you put it?—it is no use to try to draw it off after the storm has burst."
"Elizabeth," said her husband, reproachfully, "that is worse than being called a hedger and ditcher."
"Well, you know what I mean."