“And I doubt—I very much doubt,” he thought, “whether she”—here he alluded to the Sentimentalist—“would be a comfort. She would more likely be a worry and an embarrassment. She is charming, but erratic. She has ideals—and they are absurd. She has feelings—equally absurd. She would shed tears if her husband forgot to kiss her. More absurd than absurdity itself! She would resent neglect. And I believe she has a temper. Now a wife, to be satisfactory, should be docile and submissive—she should keep her ‘feelings’ in the background, attend to her household and be—well, yes!—a well-trained automaton. Then there would be peace, and a well-ordered establishment, which I should not object to. But a woman such as She is, with eyes that smile one moment and weep the next, and emotions as changeful as the wind—she would be a handful to manage!—if she could be managed, which is open to serious question! If that young ass Jack comes home and marries her I shall be sorry for him!—yes, I shall be very sorry for him! But”—here he settled himself more comfortably in his chair—“in all probability he will not survive! He is just the kind of headstrong fool to make himself a target for the German guns!”
And with this reflection, which moved him to smile quite pleasantly, he composed himself for a quiet nap before luncheon.
CHAPTER X
UP to the present moment it has seemed hardly necessary to mention the name of the Sentimentalist. She was so distinctly a Sentimentalist that the appellation bestowed upon her by her godfathers and godmothers at the baptismal font always seemed superfluous. Yet it was quite a pretty name,—and in a subtle way suggested her nature and surroundings. It was Sylvia. It was a name the Philosopher found objectionable as soon as he knew her well enough to display his contentious and “criss-cross” humours.
“Sylvia is a name that belongs to the age of decadent romantic fiction,” he told her, with a kind of derisive sternness. “You might as well be called Amanda!”
“True!” she laughed. “I wonder why I wasn’t!”
“Amanda,” he went on, “is the name of a feeble heroine in an old, very old and very stupid novel called ‘The Children of the Forest.’ She was a young person who was for ever weeping, or, when not weeping, fainting in the arms of a man. There was a villain in the piece who always pursued her—(why, no sane creature can imagine) and never, thanks to a kindly Providence, succeeded in winning her. Then there was the ‘noble’ lover of course!—a pattern of all the virtues, and an unmitigated nuisance—a fellow who shed tears with his Amanda and drew a useless sword on the smallest provocation—altogether a sickly rhodomontade of sickly sentiment and twaddle—”
“Why did you read it?” she asked.
“I was very young,” he replied with a brief snort of contempt for his unsophisticated past. “Terribly young! But quite old enough to find ‘Amanda’ a bore!”
She smiled.