I am so pleased that it has come about, my dearest Madge,” said Mrs Harland. “I always hoped that Julian would take a fancy—I mean that you—that you would come to think tenderly of Julian. It was the one hope of my life. What should I have done if he had come to me with a story of having fallen in love with one of those horrid modern young women—the sort who are for ever having their names in the papers about something or other—charities and things? Charity has become the most effective means of self-advertisement in these days.”
“If he had come to you saying that he loved such a girl, you—you would have loved her too, you dear old thing!” cried Madge, kissing her on both cheeks.
“Madge, I’m ashamed of you,” said Mrs Harland with dignity—the dignity of the lady with a grievance.
“It is of yourself you would feel ashamed if your son came to you with a tale of loving a girl—any girl—and you failed to see her exactly with his eyes,” laughed Madge. “But I know you are glad that your duty in this respect is so easy: you have always loved me, haven’t you? How could you help it? When I think of how naughty I used to be; of the panes in the greenhouse I used to break, playing cricket with Julian—panes that involved no penalties; when I think of your early peas that I used to steal and eat raw out of the pods; when I think of all the mischief I used to put poor Julian up to, usually giving him a good lead over; and when I reflect that not once did I ever receive more than a verbal reproof from you, then I know that you could not help loving me,—it was not my fault that you did not think of me as the greatest nuisance in the county.”
Mrs Harland laughed, though she had entered upon this interview with the girl who was to be her daughter-in-law very seriously, and in by no means a laughing spirit.
“I loved you always, because you were always a girl to be loved, and my prayer day and night, dear, was that Julian would come to think so in good time,” said she. “I was, I admit, slightly alarmed to find how very friendly you and he always were: every one knows that nothing is so fatal to falling in love as great friendliness.”
“Of course,” said Madge. “How funny it was that I should never think about the matter at all! And yet I feel that I must always have loved him, just as I do now. How could any one help it, my dearest mother?”
The fond mother of Julian Harland made no attempt to answer so difficult a question. Some mothers may be able to formulate on economic grounds how it is that young men do not find it impossible to resist the charms of their numerous daughters; but the mother of an only son declines to entertain the notion that he may fail to attract any girl who has had the good fortune to appear attractive in his eyes. That was why Mrs Harland fully acquiesced in Madge’s view of the irresistible qualities of Julian.
“He is a good boy, he has never been otherwise than a good boy,” she said. “Still—well, I know that his future is safe in your keeping, my Madge.”
She had heard of extremely good boys making extremely undesirable matches with young women in tobacconists’ shops. It would seem as if every university town must be overflowing with tobacconists’ shops, and as if every tobacconist’s shop must be overcrowded with attractive young ladies; one reads so much (in books written by ladies) of the undergraduate victims to tobacconists’ girls. She felt glad that her son Julian had not come to her from Oxford with a story of having made up his mind that he could only be entirely happy if married to one of these. She felt that he had been a really good son in choosing Madge Winston, the most beautiful girl in the county, rather than a snub-nosed, golden-haired girl from behind a tobacconist’s counter. Yes, he deserved great credit for his discrimination.