She would come back to lunch, after being in the village, with new and fantastic plans for my marriage. Every spinster and widow within a five mile radius was weighed as a possible Mrs. Greville. Rose dismissed Mrs. O’Gorman as too old, but her faithful Julia came under the lens.
“But no,” she was kind enough to say, “I couldn’t let you marry her. A woman must have some spirit.”
Three unmarried sisters—the Misses Sturgis—had recently taken the Allinsons’ old house—after one or two fleeting and unattractive tenants. Rose saw a good deal of them just now, and I was on more or less familiar terms both as a doctor and a neighbour.
The sisters, who were refined and affluent, had been brought up as Quakers, but they quaked no more nor did they harbour any resentment against our “steeple-house”; they had become indeed useful members of the congregation, receiving from the rector the preferential treatment meted out to this particular sect even when it retains its nonconformity.
Rose was never tired of analysing each—Miss Sturgis, Miss Hester and Miss Honor—as a possible wife for me.
“I was looking at Hester Sturgis again this morning,” she said. “Really she’s very nice. She has very pretty hair, don’t you think? She is writing an essay on Walter Pater for the next meeting of the Lowcester Literary Society. She particularly hoped that you wouldn’t be there, Dombeen. She says you’re so critical, she’d be terrified.”
I gave Rose the assurance that I should not be there.
“I wonder if wives ought to be afraid of their husbands,” the minx went on. “I mean, of their intellects?”
I made no sign of comprehension.
“Honor Sturgis is extraordinarily nice too, isn’t she?” Rose continued. “Don’t you like the way she talks? She has the kind of voice that reminds you of that speech in King Lear. Don’t you love gentle voices, Dombeen? She is tall, too. I believe she’s only an inch shorter than you. It’s absurd when husbands are immense and their wives little, isn’t it?”