‘I do not wish to be precipitate,’ observed the young surgeon. ‘I’ll take a chair, please, and then I can explain to you fully my circumstances and my difficulties.’ He suited his action to his word, and graciously signed to Barbara to sit on the sofa near his chair. Then he put his hat between his feet, calmly took off his gloves and threw them into his hat.
‘I hate precipitation,’ said Mr. Coyshe. ‘Let us thoroughly understand each other. I am a poor man. Excuse me, Miss Jordan, if I talk in a practical manner. You are long and clear headed, so—but I need not tell you that—so am I. We can comprehend each other, and for a moment lay aside that veil of romance and poetry which invests an engagement.’
Barbara bowed.
‘An atmosphere surrounds a matrimonial alliance; let us puff it away for a moment and look at the bare facts. Seen from a poetic standpoint, marriage is the union of two loving hearts, the rapture of two souls discovering each other. From the sober ground of common sense it means two loaves of bread a day instead of one, a milliner’s bill at the end of the year in addition to that of the tailor, two tons of coals where one had sufficed. I need not tell you, being a prudent person, that when I am out for the day my fire is not lighted. If I had a wife of course a fire would have to burn all day. I may almost say that matrimony means three tons of coal instead of one, and you know how costly coals come here.’
‘But, Mr. Coyshe——’
‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘I may be plain, but I am truthful. I am putting matters before you in the way in which I am forced to view them myself. When an ordinary individual looks on a beautiful woman he sees only her beauty. I see more; I anatomise her mentally, and follow the bones, and nerves, and veins, and muscles. So with this lovely matrimonial prospect. I see its charms, but I see also what lies beneath, the anatomy, so to speak, and that means increased coal, butcher’s, baker’s bills, three times the washing, additional milliners’ accounts.’
‘You know, Mr. Coyshe,’ said Barbara, a little startled at the way he put matters, ‘you know that eventually Morwell comes to Eve.’
‘My dear Miss Jordan, if a man walks in stocking soles, expecting his father-in-law’s shoes, he is likely to go limpingly. How am I to live so long as Mr. Jordan lives? I know I should flourish after his death—but in the mean time—there is the rub. I’d marry Eve to-morrow but for the expense.’
‘Is there not something sordid——’ began Barbara.
‘I will not allow you to finish a sentence, Miss Jordan, which your good sense will reproach you for uttering. I saw at a fair a booth with outside a picture of a mermaid combing her golden hair, and with the face of an angel. I paid twopence and went inside, to behold a seal flopping in a tub of dirty water. All the great events of life—birth, marriage, death—are idealised by poets, as that disgusting seal was idealised on the canvas by the artist: horrible things in themselves but inevitable, and therefore to be faced as well as we may. I need not have gone in and seen that seal, but I was deluded to do so by the ideal picture.’