“Well, I’m too excited, I lose my head in these sports,” I had to recognise—“cold-blooded as you think me. Doesn’t she like Mr. Porterfield?”
“Yes, that’s the worst of it.”
I kept making her stare. “The worst of it?”
“He’s so good—there’s no fault to be found with him. Otherwise she’d have thrown it all up. It has dragged on since she was eighteen: she became engaged to him before he went abroad to study. It was one of those very young and perfectly needless blunders that parents in America might make so much less possible than they do. The thing is to insist on one’s daughter waiting, on the engagement’s being long; and then, after you’ve got that started, to take it on every occasion as little seriously as possible—to make it die out. You can easily tire it to death,” Mrs. Nettlepoint competently stated. “However,” she concluded, “Mr. Porterfield has taken this one seriously for some years. He has done his part to keep it alive. She says he adores her.”
“His part? Surely his part would have been to marry her by this time.”
“He has really no money.” My friend was even more confidently able to report it than I had been.
“He ought to have got some, in seven years,” I audibly reflected.
“So I think she thinks. There are some sorts of helplessness that are contemptible. However, a small difference has taken place. That’s why he won’t wait any longer. His mother has come out, she has something—a little—and she’s able to assist him. She’ll live with them and bear some of the expenses, and after her death the son will have what there is.”
“How old is she?” I cynically asked.
“I haven’t the least idea. But it doesn’t, on his part, sound very heroic—or very inspiring for our friend here. He hasn’t been to America since he first went out.”