She knew me sufficiently to discern a want of sympathy; but I hope that I succeeded in concealing the greater part of my antagonism. You see, I was still a liar. Not all my intimacy with Rose and admiration for her candour had cured me. Perhaps had I said, “My dear, I hate the sight of the man: he looks priggish: do promise me to do nothing about it for six months,” it might have changed her life. At any rate it could have done no harm, and it would have had the additional merit of expressing a truth. But I couldn’t. For one thing, I had not the courage to be destructive about her own choice, when the romance was still so young; for another, I had not the right. She had seen the man and loved the man, or thought she did; and all the ground for my sudden prejudice was a tiny snapshot.
“Well?” said Rose.
“He’s not what I was expecting for you or hoping for you,” I replied. “At any rate, not in appearance. He’s—well, he’s too—too urban. Too prim. In spite of what I said about the fish-basket, I have always thought of your husband as more careless, easy-going, gayer than this. I had thought of him as having something of Nature—more of the open air or the sea—but this man’s from the Squares. He travels in the Tube. He carries an umbrella.”
“My dear Dombeen,” said Rose, “how can you know things like that? I’m sure I don’t, and I’ve seen quite a lot of him. He may be a Londoner, but that’s nothing. Barristers must live in London. I wish I hadn’t shown you that foolish picture. He’s really very distinguished looking, he has a most delightful voice, he does everything well. He’s a plus man at golf.”
“I can believe it,” I said. “But that isn’t the point. The point is not, is he a remarkable man, but is he fitted to be Rose’s husband? I’ve known you for as many years as you have been on this earth, and I’ve watched you grow up in body and mind, and perhaps I’ve been able to help you in both—and when we help people we learn about them—and I’ve thought often of the best kind of man to carry you away from me when the time came, but never was it a polished Londoner marked out for professional eminence. Where—just to mention one trifling matter—where are his jokes?”
“Jokes aren’t everything. But any way he can be quite amusing.”
“Jokes go a long way,” I said; “and you especially would be very dull without them. As for his golf, that’s nothing. Golf isn’t really a game, nor does it really carry any open-air love with it. How old is he?”
“He’s thirty-four,” said Rose.
“Thirty-four, thinning at the top, once a tutor, now a barrister, and going to marry this uncalculating child! O my dear!” I said.
It was of course absurd of me to be shocked by Rose’s choice of a husband. I suppose that there never was a girl yet whose selection did not cause surprise. The strange thing to male observers of these matches is the want of fastidiousness that even the nicest women can display. Rose had not erred in that respect, but it is notorious among men that most women do.