“You are the most beautiful woman in the world.”
She was looking at him quaintly. “Yes, if you please,” she said. So long as it was admitted she was human, she liked to be lifted in his eyes above the rest of feminine humanity. This was right, this was reasonable, this wasn’t the fantastic blossom of love-making that must needs wither in the chilly air of matrimony, this gave them both a chance of not having to eat indigestible words afterwards, of not having to allow in the future that they began their life together in a welter of lies. She was a woman and she was beautiful and it was no more than right that he should think her woman’s beauty was unique. “And I’ve told you what I think of you,” she said. “I shall not change my mind on that.”
“I shall never give you need,” he said, but he was finding this the ultimate surprise of all. “I had supposed that women liked to be wooed.”
“I think they do. I’m sure I do, but I’m a plain-dealer, Reuben.”
“I find you very wonderful,” he said, and kissed her now as she would have him kiss, with true and honest passion that had respect in it but wasn’t bleached with reverence—and very sweetly and sincerely, she kissed him back.
That was their mating and she brought it at once from the extravagant heights where he would have carried it, into deep still waters. It came quickly, it was to last permanently. These two loved, and the coming and the lasting of their love had no more to do with reason than love ever has. If Mr. Verners had the impression that he was a guileful conspirator who had made this match, he flattered himself; at the most he had only accelerated it. Inside, he sat looking forward to the quick decline in his table manners which would follow upon the going of Dorothy from his house; outside, two lovers paced the lawn in happiness, and they did not look forward then. To look forward is to imply that one’s present state can be improved.
Two months ago, they were in London; two months ago the idea that they should entertain Hepplestall, the manufacturer, the gentleman who was, in that tall Queen Anne Verners house which stood on the site of a Verners house already old when the Stuarts came to reign, would have seemed madness; the house itself would fall in righteous anger on such a guest. Now he was coming into the drawing-room with Dorothy’s hand in his, accepted suitor, welcomed son. Something of this was in Dorothy’s mind as she led him, solemn-faced and twinkling-eyed round the room. On the walls in full paintings or in miniatures, old dead Verners looked at her, and to each she introduced him. “And not one of them changed their color,” she announced.
Mrs. Verners had a last word to say. “But there is Tom.” Young Tom Verners was with his regiment in the Peninsula.
“Tom!” cried Dorothy. “I’ll show you what Tom thinks of this.” She raised a candlestick to light the face of her grandfather’s portrait on the wall. Tom, they said, was the image of his grandfather who had been painted in his youth in the uniform of a cornet of horse when he brought victory home with Marlborough. She waved the candle and as she knew very well it would, the minx, its flicker brought to the portrait the sudden appearance of a smile. “That,” she said, “is what Tom thinks,” and Mrs. Verners wept maudlin tears and felt exceedingly content. There was happiness that night in the Verners house.
When he had mounted his horse, and had set off, she came running down the steps after him. “Stop!” she cried. “No, don’t get off. Just listen. My man, my steam-man, I love you, I love you,” and ran into the house.