Yes, the man will do. Except that he is a man, and that he wants to marry my daughter, my critical eye can find no serious fault in him. Of course I wish he were dead or in some distant colony—but no, no, I don’t dislike him quite so much as that last would imply—but that wish of mine means little or nothing that need worry you. One so often does wish dead people in whom one can find no fault—indeed, they are more often than not the very people one can do so well without.
I tried him by all the tests. I offered him one of my very best cigars, the sort I never have enough of in the house, and he smoked it like a fellow of taste. Even when we were talking seriously about serious matters—you are a serious matter to him and to me—he held it now and then so that the perfumed smoke could titillate his nostrils. Had it been a bad cigar and he had done that, I should have known him for a charlatan and sent him about his business.
He came in a frock coat too, a frock coat fullish in the skirts—I hope you didn’t put him up to that. Had he worn one of those cut-away things that fasten with one button in the middle of the waistcoat! Words fail me as to what would have happened had he worn one of those.
He knows how to sit in an arm chair without getting into trouble with his elbows or showing too much sock. Has it ever occurred to you, Alexa, that in the matter of the disclosure of ankles a man should be as discreet as a woman?
We did not talk of you all the time. I should have learnt little by permitting that, for the veriest oaf can say the right things about a girl with whom he is in love; but we talked of books, of pictures, of music, of cathedrals, of the things that really matter, and he was all right there.
He has a good deal to learn, but then he has some time in which to learn it; and if you do justice to your upbringing he will not lack a competent tutor. There—that’s the prettiest compliment I have paid you for many a long day.
Your mother was charmed with him. I rather think she is writing to you at this moment to tell you so. I confess that fact does not vastly impress me, because mothers look always with a friendly eye upon their daughters’ suitors, supposing, of course, that they are anywhere near the mark.
Has it ever struck you as queer and rather significant that while women are always anxious for their daughters to marry, men, for the most part, boggle at the thought of it? It looks almost as though your sex got more out of the arrangement than ours, doesn’t it? That if they stand to lose more, as they indubitably do, they stand to win more too?
The inveterate belief of women in the glory and beauty of marriage always stupefies me. I suppose there is not one married woman alive who does not know at least half a dozen others who have come hopelessly to grief in their marriages, and yet they go on believing! Such robust faith is touching and a tremendous compliment to us.