“What an ass you must think me. I proposed, and that was the end of it; my only regret was that I did it so badly. I have spent the last three days racking my brains over a different matter, not a wholly foreign one.”
Lee made no reply. Her hand hung at her side. He took it in a quiet but determined pressure. “How am I to make you love me?” he asked. “I haven’t the vaguest idea how to go about it.”
“In the very bottom of your mind wouldn’t you really rather that you could not? I, too, have been thinking hard during the last three days. Of course, I know of international marriages that have turned out very well; but that doesn’t alter the fact that many have turned out badly—although, for that matter, the United States fairly reeks with divorce. It is a question to puzzle wiser heads than mine. Are most English marriages happy?”
“Probably not; but the point is that if you marry your own sort, you know where you are. If I had ever met an English girl who attracted me one half as much as you do, and had married her, we should have followed along certain traditional lines and got on fairly well, even if there were no great happiness. You see an Englishman is certain of several things if he marries a perfectly normal Englishwoman of his own class. She will obey him, she will have as many children as he wishes, her scheme of life will be his, and, no matter how bright she may be, she will adapt herself to him—which is not the least important point. An Englishman simply cannot adapt himself to anybody. It isn’t in him. He can be a good husband on his own lines, particularly if he loves his wife; and if he loves her enough, and she makes herself more charming than other women, he’ll be faithful to her, and do what he can to make her happy. But she must adapt herself to him.”
“You have the virtue of frankness! Are you trying to frighten me off?”
“It would not be fair of me to deceive you.” He certainly looked very serious. Lee studied his profile meditatively, but she did not withdraw her hand. “I don’t see why it should frighten you. We have always been most sympathetic. We really loved each other when we were little chaps, and were drawn together at once. In all these years I have had no such confidante, no one who has been so necessary to me. And you have not been indifferent; never was there so faithful a correspondent. If you loved me enough, we should be very happy. Theories go to the winds when a man wants a woman as much as I want you, and love would settle all our differences.”
“I wonder!” They walked on in silence for a moment; then she said: “How brave you are! Much braver than I should be if I consented to marry you; for I, at least, know you fairly well, whereas you are merely generalising, and do not know me in the least. I might give you an exhaustive description of the conditions in which I had been brought up, from that in which my mother played no small part to the men that have been my slaves ever since I put on long frocks. I might analyse to you the growth of my individuality, describing the influence which the management of my own affairs has had on my character, the fact that I have done my own thinking all my life, and then—these three years in which I have been a real belle, and seen more than one man make an idiot of himself. I might tell you all that, and even enter into a wise dissertation on the racial differences of our two civilisations; but nothing could give you a real idea of myself, the idea you would have absorbed if you had been a part of my environment for the last ten years. Nothing could be wiser than your observation that we should marry our own sort. As far as I can figure it out, it comes to this: If I married Randolph he would spend his life buttoning my boots. If I married you, I should spend my life pulling off yours——”
“Good heavens, no! What a little beast I was!”
He laughed heartily, although, oddly enough, his laughter did not interfere with his seriousness in the least. It would have dissipated that of any other man she knew; but he went on at once. “I should not quarrel with Fate for giving me a wife who interested me more than any woman of my own sort could do, if you were always perfectly open and frank with me. I should hate being intrigued, and I should never have the patience nor the inclination to sit down and unravel any woman’s complexities. If you did not go to work deliberately to puzzle me, I should soon know you, and I cannot imagine you other than absolutely charming.”
“If I pluck out my complexities—in other words, my individuality—by the roots, and adapt myself to you.”