“Stay and talk to me a little while; do! or I shall think you are offended by my stupidity yesterday. I have to thank you for your reminder last night. If you had not stopped me I should have spoken even more strongly than I did, and have been filled with remorse. As it is, I don’t think anything I said could have been responsible for this attack. Considering all things I kept pretty cool, didn’t I now?”
“I think you did,” conceded Mollie, smiling. “No; I expect it has been coming on for some days, and that was why he was so cross. You generally find people are ill if they are more than usually snappy. Poor Uncle Bernard! I wish one could help; but I am glad he has not Mrs Wolff to fidget him. Do you know,” said Mollie, fixing her candid eyes upon Jack’s face, and inwardly rejoicing at having hit on an impersonal topic of conversation,—“do you know Mrs Wolff is an unending problem to one! I think about her for hours at a time, and try to puzzle her out, but I never get one step further.”
“Really!” Jack searched in his pockets for materials, and began rolling up one of the everlasting cigarettes. “I’m surprised to hear that. I should not have thought she could have occupied more than two minutes. For my own part I find it impossible to think of her at all. She was born; she exists; she will probably die! Having said so much, you have exhausted the subject.”
“Not at all,” contradicted Mollie frankly. “There’s lots more to consider. What is she really, and what is the real life that she lives inside that funny little shell? And was she ever a child who laughed and danced, and raced about, and was good and naughty, and played with toys, and lived among giants and fairies? We lived fairy tales, Ruth and I, and had giants to tea in a nursery four yards square. And we hunted ferocious lions and tigers, who either turned out kind and harmless, or were slain by imaginary swords. Did Mrs Wolff always know exactly that two and two make four, and never by any chance made a delicious pretence that it was five? And when she went to school had she a chum whom she adored, and wrote letters to every other day filled with ‘dears’ and ‘darlings,’ and did she ever shirk ‘prep,’ or play tricks on the teachers, or sit up to a dormitory supper?”
“Certainly not! She was a good little girl who never soiled her pinafore, nor dreamt of anything she could not see, and she worked hard at school and remained persistently in the middle of the class, and gained high marks for neatness and decorum. She never had a chum because she is incapable of caring for one person more than another.”
“But what about ‘poor Mr Wolff’? Surely she must have had, at least, a preference for him! That’s another problem—how did anyone come to fall in love with her, and what did he fall in love with, and why, and when, and where? I long to know all about it, for it seems so incomprehensible.”
Jack laughed with masculine amusement at her curiosity.
“Not incomprehensible at all. I can give a very good guess how it happened. She was a timid, shrinking, little thing, rather pretty—her features are not at all bad—and ‘poor Mr Wolff’ was a big burly fellow who took a fancy to her because she was a contrast to himself. She didn’t say much, so he credited her with thinking the more. She agreed with everything he said, so he considered her the cleverest woman he knew. He discovered his error, no doubt, in sackcloth and ashes, poor fellow; but mercifully he had not to endure many years of disenchantment. I can’t imagine a worse fate than being tied for life to an automaton!”
“Humph!” Mollie pondered, pinching her soft chin between thumb and finger. “He might not be so particular as you... Did you ever... Have you ever,—I mean, did you ever meet...”
Jack blew a cloud of smoke from between his lips with a half-embarrassed smile.