“What’s the matter?” she inquired, prepared by his face for news of trouble.
“Mrs. Hawthorne, we’ve done it!” said Gerald. “Giglioli tells me that he’s giving up the army, and Brenda has promised to marry him!” He was on the verge of laughing hysterically.
“Oh!” Mrs. Hawthorne paused to watch him, and wonder 133why they should not without further to-do rejoice and triumph. “Well? What’s wrong with that?”
“Oh, Mrs. Hawthorne, it’s deadly!” he exclaimed with conviction. “If it were a simple solution, why shouldn’t it have been suggested before?”
“It did suggest itself to me, in the quiet of my inside, you know.”
“But you, dear lady, can’t be supposed to understand. Oh, it’s either too, too beautiful, or else too, too bad! And in this dear world of ours the probability is that it’s too bad. He was taken off his feet by his emotion; he offered her what he will feel later he had no right to offer–a good deal more than his life. But it shows, doesn’t it, that he does immensely love her? To throw into the balance everything–his career, his family, his country–and offer them up! To cut his throat for a kiss.”
“You’re quite right; I can’t understand,” she hurried in. “What makes you say ‘cut his throat’? Couldn’t he go into some other business just as well as the army?”
“All in the world he’s fitted for is the army. Do you see that beautiful fellow going to America, for instance, and earning a living as a teacher of Italian, or as the representative of some tobacco interest? There is no way of earning a proper living over here, you know. Oh, I’m afraid he will feel, when he wakes up, like a deserter toward his country and an ingrate toward his family and even toward Brenda like a misguider of her youth.”
“But, look here, isn’t there a chance that having each other will make up to them for everything else?”
“That of course was their sentiment at the moment of doing it. We did the work so well, Mrs. Hawthorne, that their passion, raised to a beautiful madness, would make 134them see anything as possible to be done so long as it gave them to each other, obviated the horrible necessity to part. Oh, it is touching, but dreadful! What were we dreaming? The thing I so greatly fear is that when he comes to himself he will feel dishonored, and Italians do not bear that easily, if at all.”