“Well, wait till he comes for you.”
“Oh, he won't come, for fear of shortening my pleasure.”
Susan then explains that George is so foolish that he never will go into the house when she is not in it. “And here is a drizzle come on, and there he will be sitting out in it, I know, if I don't go and drive him in.”
Events justify the prediction. The good wife finds her husband sitting on the gate kicking his heels quite contented and peaceable, only he would not pay the house the compliment of going into it when she was not there. He told her once he looked on it as no better than a coal-hole when she was not shining up and down it.
N. B.—They have been some years married. A calm but very tender conjugal love sits at this innocent hearth.
George has made a great concession for an Englishman. He has solemnly deposited before witnesses his sobriquet of “Unlucky George,” not (he was careful to explain) because he found the great nugget, nor because the meadow he bought in Bathurst for two hundred pounds has just been sold by Robinson for twelve thousand pounds, but on account of his being Susan's husband.
And Susan is very happy. Besides the pleasure of loving and being loved, she is in her place in creation. The class of women (a very large one) to which she belongs comes into the world to make others happy. Susan is skillful at this and very successful. She makes everybody happy round her, “and that is so pleasant.” She makes the man she loves happy, and that is delightful.
My reader shall laugh at her; my unfriendly critic shall sneer at her. As a heroine of a novel she deserves it; but I hope for their own sakes neither will undervalue the original in their passage through life. These average women are not the spice of fiction, but they are the salt of real life.
William Fielding is godfather to Susan's little boy.
He can stand by his brother's side and look without compunction on Anne Fielding's grave, and think without an unmanly shudder of his own.