“I don’t know. I didn’t notice anything particular about them. They were just ordinary women.”
“There you are,” said Lord Manton. “It’s your ordinary, well-behaved woman who drives a man perfectly frantic if he has any spirit in him. I couldn’t live with an ordinary woman for three months at a stretch. Look at my daughter, for instance. How long do you suppose I could stand her? Certainly not three months, not two months. I’m at the end of my tether after a six weeks’ visit to her. And I’m not married to her. I haven’t got to be very close to her. I haven’t got to see her in a red dressing-gown combing her hair. I haven’t got to listen to the noise she makes when she’s washing her teeth. You don’t understand these things because you’re not married. Very likely you never will understand them, because Miss Blow’s not an ordinary woman——”
“She is not,” said Mr. Goddard.
“But these two poor fellows,” said Lord Manton, “had got to do with ordinary women. They had to give their opinions on new hats, had to listen to stories about the things which the servants did or didn’t do. Of course they bolted.”
“I wish to goodness they’d have bolted out of some other district, then, if they had to bolt. Why should they come here? You’d think it would be much more convenient to run away from a place like London than from Clonmore. But I don’t believe they have bolted.”
“They can’t have got lost. The thing’s absurd on the face of it. Take a single point in addition to all those that you’ve made already. Take their bicycles. A man might accidentally lose himself, but his bicycle couldn’t possibly get lost. He must leave it on the side of the road somewhere, and wherever he leaves it you’re sure to find it. You can get rid of a bicycle on purpose, though even that’s not so easy. Sinking it in the sea is about the only way I can imagine of effectually disposing of it. But you can’t lose it and yourself. Nobody could lose both himself and a bicycle unless he did it on purpose.”
“But——” said Mr. Goddard.
He had a whole series of criticisms utterly destructive of Lord Manton’s hypothesis. He had seen the Members of Parliament. He felt that he knew them. He found it impossible to imagine their breaking out into wild Bohemianism, sickening of respectability, rebelling against the monotony of any woman, however ordinary. There was Mr. Dick, who had bounded out of the railway carriage, volatile, debonnair, gay with familiar quotations. There was Mr. Sanders, rigid, mathematical, a little morose on account of his weak heart. Lord Manton might conceivably find an ordinary woman maddening; but Mr. Dick, once he began, would go on kissing her contentedly for years and years. He would appreciate the way in which his dinner was cooked for him. Mr. Sanders would appreciate that too. He might be a little exacting, would, no doubt, expect his weak heart to be taken seriously, would put a woman in her proper place in the settled order of things, and keep her there. But both Mr. Dick and Mr. Sanders would recognize that a woman must be allowed to wash her teeth. They would not resent the noise of the water gurgling in her mouth. They would both know that women must comb their hair, and that a red dressing-gown is a suitable and convenient garment under certain circumstances. They would not be angry when they were told about the misdeeds of maid-servants, a trying and exhausting class to deal with. They were men with well-balanced minds, men of practical common sense, men who would not fly blindly in the face of facts. They were not the men to run away from their wives, or even from their aunts.
“But——” he began again.