“I never thought about it,” answered Helen.
“I know that some people have wondered at it; for I was a girl likely to marry—or it may be better to say, likely to be sought in marriage. I had good looks, good temper, good birth, and a good fortune: and I dare say I was just as willing to be chosen as all young girls are. Yes, I say that all girls possess an innate wish to marry; it is implanted in their nature, comes with their mother’s milk. Let their station be high or low, a royal princess, if you will, or the housemaid Jemima Cattledon suggested just now, the same natural instinct lies within each—a wish to be a wife. And no reason, either, why they should not wish it; it’s nothing to be ashamed of; and Helen, my dear, I would rather hear a girl avow it openly, as you do, than pretend to be shocked at its very mention.”
Some gleams of sunlight flickered on Miss Deveen’s white hair and fine features as she sat under the trees, her bronze-coloured silk gown falling around her in rich folds, and a big amethyst brooch fastening her collar. I began to think how good-looking she must have been when young, and where the eyes of the young men of those days could have been. Lady Whitney, looking like a bundle in her light dress that ill became her, sat near, fanning herself.
“Yes, I do wonder, now I think of it, that you never married,” said Helen.
“To tell you the truth, I wonder myself sometimes,” replied Miss Deveen, smiling. “I think—I believe—that, putting other advantages aside, I was well calculated to be a wife, and should have made a good one. Not that that has anything to do with it; for you see the most incapable women marry, and remain incapable to their dying day. I could mention wives at this moment, within the circle of my acquaintance, who are no more fitted to be wives than is that three-legged stool Johnny is balancing himself upon; and who in consequence unwittingly keep their husbands and their homes in a state of perpetual turmoil. I was not one of these, I am sure; but here I am, unmarried still.”
“Would you marry now?” asked Helen briskly: and we all burst into a laugh at the question, Miss Deveen’s the merriest.
“Marry at sixty! Not if I know it. I have at least twenty years too many for that; some might say thirty. But I don’t believe many women give up the idea of marriage before they are forty; and I do not see why they should. No, nor then, either.”
“But—why did you not marry, Miss Deveen?”
“Ah, my dear, if you wish for an answer to that question, you must ask it of Heaven. I cannot give one. All I can tell you is, that I did hope to be married, and expected to be married, waited to be married; but here you see me in my old age—Miss Deveen.”
“Did you—never have a chance of it—an opportunity?” questioned Helen with hesitation.