“It’s a fact,” he admitted slowly. “I was not planning to marry for many a year. I don’t know that I thought seriously about doing it at all. In fact, I was so afraid that I might be injudicious and get married—or get myself married—” he smiled in the darkness—“that I swore off even on flirtations some time before I came out here. But when you came along with the ice-bag and your nice voice, and I got a good look at you next day, all that went up in the air. I knew then and there that I wanted to get married as quick as I could. I’d been in love before a half dozen times, but I knew every time that it wasn’t a love I wanted to marry on. It don’t matter how much a man loves a woman, he don’t love her in the right way unless she does him credit. I felt that way about you. You were the kind of woman I could be proud of all my life. ‘That’s the girl for me,’ I said, and sure enough—” his pause expressed the idea that the outcome had been foreordained.
His desire to compliment her was so unmistakable, his admiration was so sincere, that Charlotte was able to stifle quickly the first instinct to rebuke his unconscious patronage. His egoism, after all, was of an inoffensive variety. He was not boasting himself as a connoisseur, but was testifying to the completeness with which she satisfied his ideal. The wife lay silent for a long time, studying his face, which was just dimly visible in the glow of his cigar. When she spoke, it was as she rose from her chair.
“I hope I’ll always be able to live up to your conception of me,” she said. “I mean to try.”
“Nonsense,” replied the man of common sense. “You just suit me perfectly as you are. Why, you’d spoil it all if you even thought of trying. What is there to try? You are you. I wouldn’t have the biggest fault or the smallest virtue in you altered by the ten-millionth of an inch.”
When Charlotte had shut the door of her stateroom and had snapped on the light, she sank for an instant on the locker, with a face in which pride, shame, and contrition were tumultuously mingled. For why had she spent twenty-eight years acquiring tastes and criterions which, at that moment, made her seem incredibly mean and ungenerous?
Chapter VI
It was well on in the afternoon of the next day when they anchored off Cuyo, which, with its squat lighthouse and low shore, impressed Charlotte as a dreary, lonesome spot. A launch, which was lying abreast the lighthouse, saluted them with vociferous toots, and Collingwood waved his hat in joyous response.
“That’s Mac, all right,” he said. “He’ll be aboard directly. It’s a wonder he didn’t hire the town band to welcome us.”
Charlotte winced and secretly rejoiced that for once Mr. Maclaughlin’s initiative had failed to come up to its reputation. Yet when a boat came alongside, and a grizzled Scotch-American stepped up the short ladder, her greeting was warm enough to fully satisfy her husband.