“Liverpool, on business! Dear me! I’ll tell you another odd thing, George,—a coincidence.”
“Well?”
“You’re going to Liverpool to-morrow on business. Well, to-day, Mrs. Witt went to Liverpool on business.”
“The devil!” said George, for the second time.
CHAPTER XI.
PRESENTING AN HONEST WOMAN.
To fit square pegs into round holes is one of the favourite pastimes of Nature. She does it roughly, violently, and with wanton disregard of the feelings of the square pegs. When, in her relentless sport, she has at last driven the poor peg in and made it fit, by dint of knocking off and abrading all its corners, philosophers glorify her, calling the process evolution, and plain men wonder why she did not begin at the other end, and make the holes square to fit the pegs.
The square peg on which these trite reflections hang is poor Neaera Witt. Nature made her a careless, ease-loving, optimistic creature, only to drive her, of malice prepense, into an environment—that is to say, in unscientific phrase, a hole—where she had need of the equipment of a full-blooded conspirator.
She resisted the operation; she persistently trusted to chance to extricate her from the toils into which she, not being a philosopher, thought chance had thrown her. If she saw a weapon ready to her hand, she used it, as she had used the Bournemouth character, but for the most part she trusted to luck. George Neston would fail, or he would relent; or Gerald would be invincibly incredulous, or, she would add, smiling at her face in the glass, invincibly in love. Somehow or other matters would straighten themselves out; and, at the worst, ten days more would bring the marriage; and after the marriage—— But really, ten days ahead is as far as one can be expected to look, especially when the ten days include one’s wedding.