“It was plain to me from the beginning how Peg was won to you,” said he.
“Then, in the beginning why did not you act?”
“How could I? Peg was under fire for her fair repute. Had I broken up my Cabinet, it would have been Peg's death blow. Folk would have told how it was for the war upon her and because she could not be defended. No, I must give her time for triumph; that achieved, the rest might happen and she be made secure in Florida. It was the one trail, and I followed it.” The General came over to my chair. “Old comrade,” said he with a world of goodness in his manner, “if I have thrust a thorn in your heart, forgive me. If friendship can cure, that thorn will be plucked away.”
On another day the General was in a temper for abstract philosophies. It lay in a hot time of summer and his moods flowed lazily. His fancy would run away to the topic of woman and her helplessness.
“Beautiful and sweet, she is,” he was saying, “and a blessing, too; but the man must ever bear upon his mind her weakness, and be her buckler even from herself. He must be on guard for both. For she is as a child, and nowise deep nor fortified of any rooted strength. Your man, on the other hand, while wanting those traits of beauty which shine forth in woman like the stars at night, is withal safe enough. He is cold like an iceberg, and like an iceberg he rides steadily throughout every gale with nine-tenths of him beneath the sea. Your tempest can go no deeper than the surface; it cannot search the ocean's depths, and so the man swims safely.”
Where the General would have brought up in these tongue-wanderings one may only guess. He was never to finish, for in a flurry of irritation I interrupted him.
“Now let me tell you one thing,” said I, wheeling on him with a sort of venom; “to my mind, your man is a dullish fool of neither bones nor brains, and your woman has nothing to fear from him.”
“What's that?” cried the General, startled into letting fall his pipe; “what do I hear you say?”
“And more,” I went on; “your man will do whatever your woman commands. He will go or stay, or fetch or carry, or weep or laugh, or live or die by the least breath of her lips. Your man is mere clay; your woman is the potter to mould him and bake him and break him in form and fashion and fragment as shall best flatter her caprice or most nicely match the color of her fancy. For virtue, your man is a toad and your woman that blossom by which he crouches. For power, your woman is the wind, while your man is that poor scrap of nothing to be tossed thereon.”
“You are a cynic,” retorted the General with a snort, and after surveying me for a moment with a warlike eye he sauntered away for another pipe.