But warmth revives us, and when I was again in the corner-seat of a smoker, down the window of which the heat ran in long, straggly trickles, I began to think that, after all, though I had to wash out the seduction motive, there might be something in the idea of the lost return-ticket, and the last train to Anerley. Suppose now that the young man had for a long time besieged unsuccessfully his fair companion, and that on the refusal of his third proposal he had decided that he would never secure the hand of his beloved unless he managed to compromise innocently her honour?
Yes, that might work out. He would steal her money at the restaurant; they would reach the booking-office where the scene which I have already described would be enacted. There would be the return to the flat and the discovery that the porter was out, and that, after all, he had forgotten to cash the cheque he had written out that morning.
“But what am I to do?” she would say.
And, with well-simulated confusion, he would mutter something about not minding a “shake-down” on the sofa, and that if she would take his room ...
“Oh, but I couldn’t! How could I? What would mother say?”
Just a little touch that would place the mother at once before the reader’s eye—a plump, heavy woman with a small, unsatisfactory husband. A woman of strong passions, that have focussed themselves on a rigid observance of the proprieties.
“But what else are you to do?” the young man would exclaim, and he would stammer something about giving her his key. And, in the end, she would consent to pass the night there, and next morning they would arrive at Anerley together with the milk, and be received by the mother in the front-parlour, a cold, melancholy room with the fire smoking dismally. She would receive them with her hands on her hips, and she would say one word, “Well!” and then listen while the young man stammered his explanations. Of course she would not believe him: he had never expected her to, and would have been miserably disappointed if she had. He would listen to her threats and tirades, and then, at the right moment, he would draw himself up to his full height.
“Madam,” he would say, “your accusations are untrue; the door of the room in which your daughter slept was locked all night. I slept on the sofa. But to prove my honour, and to vindicate hers, I am prepared—and shall be proud—to marry your daughter.”
A slow smile would spread across the mother’s face. Honour saved, a daughter off her hands; and at last the daughter, moved by his chivalry, might even fall in love with her knight-errant.
I considered this solution during the two miles’ walk from Hassocks station. It was original. I had never seen it done before. Such a situation is common enough in modern fiction. But the mistake is usually genuine, and that scene in the dismal parlour is the prelude to long years of married misery. Occasionally the affair is arranged by the girl, if she can trust her lover’s lack of enterprise. For a girl is more interested in marriage than a man, and proposes it indirectly more often than the admirers of the strong man would have us think. But for a man to plan such an escapade—that would indeed be new. And I went to sleep contented, thinking that the next day would pass pleasantly in congenial work.