In the care of his two aunts he had placed her.
"And there she'll have to stay for some time. She wants educating," said he, and forthwith he proceeded to recount her little ignorances, her little follies, her little mistakes, at each of which he threw back his head and laughed.
"She knows nothing," he continued; "not that I think a woman ought to know much. But she knows absolutely nothing. I had thoughts of her coming over here to school. But she's too old for that; besides, she's nicely tucked away there in Ballysheen."
The name struck quickly on my ears. Ballysheen? Why was it familiar? One of those tricks of sense, perhaps. You know an Irish name anywhere. But I had no inclination then to follow it out. I beckoned my waiter for another Kümmel. My empty glass betokened idleness. I could see the woman's eyes wandering in my direction. The man would never have suspected me of listening, for when a man tells a story, the sound of it absorbs him. Women, I find, are different to that. They are ever aware of the thousand things about them.
"How is she going to be taught?" she asked when her suspicions were allayed by the filling of my glass.
He inhaled deeply of his cigarette and slowly blew out the smoke between pursed lips. "Oh—they'll teach her," said he.
And they—were his two maiden aunts. From his ill-phrased description of them, I could see it all. He had caught a bird of brilliant plumage in the wild heart of a tropic forest, and to a cage one foot by three he had brought her; a cage hung in some dull drab room, where never the light of the sun could enter. Behind the bars of their little bigotries and their little prejudices, this poor untamed creature was beating her tired wings, or she was sitting there waiting with watching eyes for him to return and marry her.
It was not the manner of his telling that made the story real. It was the place. That glare of lights, those sinuous sounds of music that crept upon one's ears, all the blatant artificiality of it, and this casual narrative told with a laugh and a glass to the lips! You hear strange conversations in public places; but I had never heard anything more strange than this.
Her father was wealthy, so it seemed. It was this that had attracted him to the match.
"She'll have ten thousand, when we marry," he continued; "worth thinking about, you know. And more when her father dies. But there's one ghastly drawback. I got used to it over there; but since I've been back in England—talking, for instance, to women like yourself—I sometimes wonder how the devil I'm going to do it."