“My mind is not narrow,” he said, stiffly. “And though it may please you to consider me a fossil—”
“I didn’t say you were a fossil,” she interposed. “I said you had fossil ideas—”
“It is the same thing,” he retorted. “A man and his ideas are one. I certainly have not a mind adapted to examine the trifling sentiments which affect your sex, but the opinions I have formed are based on long experience. You express a childish pleasure in the fancy that women are going to have their day,—now I maintain that they have always had it, to the fullest extent of their very limited capabilities. Any wider range of effort would bring them nothing but disaster.”
With this he clapped a misshapen old “Homburg” hat on his head, opened the window, which was really a glass door, and went out into the garden, puffing at his briar. He had not a good figure—it was inclined to be stumpy, but there was a certain pathetic droop of his shoulders which betrayed both weariness and age, and the pretty Sentimentalist, quick to observe this, was suddenly touched and compassionate. She sprang up and ran after him.
“Don’t be cross!” she said. “I’m sorry I called your ideas fossils! But—you know—fossils are really wonderful things!”
Her laughing blue eyes, her tossing fair hair, and the bewildering “frou-frou” of her dainty blue and white silk and chiffon garments made quite a stir in the calm evening silence of the garden,—and for the moment the self-centred, self-opiniated, self-styled “Philosopher” felt a sudden twinge of shamed conscience. In his own heart he knew he was what he would call “amusing himself” with a bright feminine creature who took the world on trust and accepted him at his own inflated valuation,—he found it convenient and agreeable to stay at her father’s house and enjoy the luxuries of a well-equipped home without paying for it—especially when he could talk to a pretty hostess and subtly insinuate a kind of love-making without any reality in it. Her mother was dead—she was alone to receive and entertain such guests as her pedantic father invited to flatter him on his personal belief in himself as a great philologist,—she was,—(in that undefended condition)—“fair game” to such a man as the Philosopher. There was Jack—Jack was certainly a bore—but after all he was merely a neighbour, the eldest son of what the Philosopher called a “doubtful” American, who had taken a small cottage some little way down the river for the fishing season. Jack really didn’t count for much. So the Philosopher smoothed his furrowed brow and pretended to be appeased, as he replied to the soft voice ringing in his ears—
“I’m not cross,” he said. “I’m never cross! I never quarrel! It’s you! You! You fly into a tantrum directly you are contradicted. You can’t bear to be contradicted. And you call me a fossil! Nice way to talk! Never mind!—I forgive you!”
With which grandiloquent assurance he took her hand and patted it. She withdrew it gently,—she felt he was unjust. She knew she had not “flown into a tantrum” and that what she had said was merely playful and without any thought of “quarrel.” She walked beside him in the glamour of the late after-glow for a few paces in silence,—and he was uncomfortably conscious that the delicate subtlety of her personality expressed an unspoken but nevertheless decisive lessening of her appreciation of him as a man.
“And so,” he said, presently, with a laboured attempt at lightness—“you approve of Jack as a modern Knight-errant swearing eternal fidelity?”
“I approve of Jack entirely—as Jack,” she answered, quietly. “He’s a good fellow, and very unselfish.”