Well, well, life is strange, and women are the strangest part of life, and Phemie could not have given a reason for what she did save this, that she hoped some day to meet Basil Stondon and his wife in society, and astonish them with her cold bright wit, her unimpassioned manner, her worldly ideas, and her unromantic views of life.
And so the years went on, as I have said, and still there was only one suitor who hung back, one man who felt that a woman like this was not calculated to make his life happy, his home a peaceful one.
Obedient to the last request her lips had framed, Major Morrice never through the years lost sight of his dead love’s friend, but visited her, talked with her, walked with her, and had been so near proposing many times that the world had almost ground for its gossip when it said at last they were engaged.
Never, however, even within sight of that shore came they: the woman was serious—she really did not intend to marry again. When her friends fancied she was in jest, she spoke in sober earnest.
Had she been as one of those with whom she was associating, she might have buried not one but twenty husbands, and assisted at the obsequies of the last with cheerful resignation. But life with its sorrows, was an earnest affair to Phemie, and its troubles were matters of serious import to her.
“I suppose you think I like this whirl,” she said, one day, to Major Morrice; and he answered,
“It is impossible for me to think otherwise, seeing how thoroughly you seem to enjoy it.”
“One must live,” Mrs. Stondon asserted, a little defiantly.
“True; but is it necessary always to live in public?” he replied.
“It is to me,” she said; “it is to me.”