Keene saw his advantage, but was far too wise to follow it up then. The weaker sex, as a rule, are acute but not very close reasoners; they mix up their majors and minors with a charming recklessness; and, if innocent of nothing else, are generally guiltless of a syllogism. It follows that, in the course of an argument, it is easy enough to entangle them in their talk. When such a chance occurs, don’t come down on your pretty antagonist with “I thought you said so and so,” but be politic as well as generous, and pass it by. They will do more justice to your self-denial than they would have done to your dialectic talents. Corinna loves to be contradicted, but hates to be convinced, and dreads no monster so much as a short-horned—dilemma. She may forgive the first offense as inadvertent, but “one more such victory and you are lost.” Think how often clemency has succeeded where severity would have failed. What did that discreet Eastern emir, when he found his fair young wife sleeping in a garden, where she had no earthly business to be? He laid his drawn sabre softly across her neck, and retired without breaking her slumbers. The cold blade was the first thing Zuleika felt when she woke; I can not guess what her sensations were; but when she gave the weapon back to her solemn lord, 25 she pressed her rosy lips thrice on the blue steel, and made a vow that she most probably kept; and Hussein Bey never was happier, than when he drew her back to his broad breast, looking into her face silently with his calm, grave smile.
I fancy our sisters enter into an argument with more simple good faith and eagerness than we are wont to indulge in; so that it is probably easier to tease and exasperate them, which is amusing enough while it lasts. But no doubt it hurts them sometimes more than we are aware of; and, after all, breaking a butterfly on the wheel is poor pastime, and not a very athletic sport. The glory, too, to be won is so small that it scarcely compensates for the pain we inflict, and may, perchance, eventually feel. Is Achilles inclined to be proud of the strength of his arm, or the keenness of his falchion, as he grovels in the dust at the slain Amazon’s side? Nay, he would give half his laurels to be able to close that awful gaping wound—to see the proud lips soften for a moment from their immutable scorn—to detect the faintest tremor in the long white limbs that never will stir again.
The solemnity of these illustrations, in which battles, murders, and sudden deaths are mingled, will prove that I regard the subject as by no means trivial, but am sincerely anxious to warn my comrades against yielding to a temptation which assails us daily.
On these principles the Cool Captain acted, then. His gay laugh opened a bridge to the retreating enemy as he said, “How my poor character must have been worried last night! I wish Mrs. Molyneux had been there. She is good enough to stand up for her old friend sometimes. I could hardly expect you to take so much trouble for a very recent acquaintance.”
“Of course not,” replied Cecil. “I was not in a position to contradict any thing, even if I had wished to do so. But, I remember, I thought I would speak to you about my brother. You know enough of him already to guess why I am nervous about him. I almost forced him to take me abroad; and he is exposed to so many more dangers here than at home. Please, don’t encourage him to play, or tempt him into any thing wrong. Indeed, I don’t mean to speak harshly or uncourteously, so you need not be angry.”
She raised her eyes to her companion’s with a pretty pleading. He met them fairly. Whatever his intentions might be, no one could say that the major ever shrank from looking friend or foe in the face.
“I am sorry that you should think the warning necessary. Supposing that it were so—on my honor, he is safe from me. I should like to alter your opinion of me, if it were possible. Will you give me a chance?” The others joined them before she could reply; but more than once that day Cecil wondered whether, even during their short acquaintance, she had not sometimes dealt scanty justice to Royston Keene.
CHAPTER X.
There is a pleasant theory—that every woman may be loved, once at least in her life, if she so wills it. It must be true: how, otherwise, can you account for the number of hard-featured visages—lighted up by no redeeming ray of intellect—that preside at “good men’s feasts,” and confront them at their firesides? How do the husbands manage? Do they, from constantly contemplating an inferior type of creation, lose their comparing and discriminating powers, so that, like the Australian and Pacific aborigines, they come to regard as points of beauty peculiarities that a more advanced civilization shrinks from? Or do their visual organs actually become impaired, like those of captives who can see clearly only in their own dungeon’s twilight, and flinch before the full glare of day? If neither of these is the case, they must sometimes sympathize with that dreary dilemma of Bias which the adust Aldrich quotes in grim irony—Εἴ μὲν κάλην, ἕξεις κοίνην, εἰ δ᾽ αἰσχρὰν, ποίνην. (Whether of the two horns impaled the sage of Priēne?) Some, of course, are fully alive to the outward defects of their partners; but few are so candid as the old Berkshire squire, who, looking after his spouse as she left the room, said, pensively, “Excellent creature, that! I’ve liked her better every day for twenty years, but I’ve always thought she’s the plainest-headed woman in England!” Fewer still would wish to emulate the sturdy plain-speaking of the “gudeman” in the Scottish ballad, who, when his witch-wife boasted how she bloomed into beauty after drinking the “wild-flower wine,” replied, undauntedly,