“Yes, with some—well, some woman.”
“Some woman? I wonder if I know her husband.” There was a considerable pause.
Brian pointed a ridiculous, hooked forefinger toward a hollow that from beneath resembled a cave, half-way up the precipitous wall of cliffs.
“That’s where she comes on certain nights of the year. She stands at the entrance to that cave, and cries for her lover as she cried that night when she came only to find his dead body,” said Brian, neutralizing the suggested tragedy in his narrative by keeping exhibited that comical crook in his index finger. “Ay, your honours, it’s a quare story of pity.” Both his auditors looked first at his face, then at the crook in his finger, and laughed. They declined to believe in the pity of it.
“It is preposterous,” said Harold. “He writes to me that he never quite knew before what it was to love. He knows it now, he says, and as it’s more expensive than he ever imagined it could be, he’s reluctantly compelled to cut down my allowance. Then it is that he begins to talk of the crimson mouth—I fancy it’s followed by something about the passion of the fervid South—so like my father, but like no other man in the world. He adds that perhaps one day I may also know ‘what’tis to love.’”
“At present, however, he insists on your looking at that form of happiness through another man’s eyes? Your father loves, and you are to learn—approximately—what it costs, and pay the expenses.”
“That’s the situation of the present hour. What am I to do?”
“Marry Helen Craven.”
“That’s brutally frank, at any rate.”
“You see, you’re not a working man with a vote. I can afford to be frank with you. Of course, that question which you have asked me is the one that was on your mind two days ago, when you began to talk about what you called ‘woman in the abstract.’”