“Bah!” exclaimed Oliver. “Let’s go and have a swim. It made me sick.”
“Me too,” said Dorothy. “It made me cold all over to hear her promising to forsake all others and keep herself only for that wizened—stick. Why should she forsake all others, just because she is married? It sounds as if she were going as missionary to the Indians.”
“Or as trained nurse to an isolation hospital,” Oliver suggested.
“When I am married,” said Dorothy, “I shall not forsake all others—at least, unless I get a better one than that.”
“You are severe critics,” I murmured, secretly delighted to observe that the children were using the dialect of their feelings, rather than that polite language which well-bred youth, like Japanese ladies, employ in presence of their elders. “At what age do you expect to be married, Dorothy?”
“I shall never marry!” she replied with a deep blush. She is of course at exactly the correct age for saying that. But if you haven’t seen her, you can have no adequate notion how dire and how delicious that threat is on her lips. She inherits “eligibility” from both her parents. Her mother has a clear, expressive, sunlit loveliness; but Dorothy’s beauty has in it an element of subtlety—from her father—and a suggestion of sorcery and peril. She has her mother’s complexion but her father’s eyes. It is the unexpected combination and contrast that fascinates one: the filleted blond hair and the fluent roses of the fair skin, with the brown eyes, dark yet full of lambent lights—eyes of which the centres seem gleaming paths, leading into shadows where a man might easily wander and be lost.
“And why won’t you marry?” I pursued; for as we were driving at a good speed over a rough road, I was sure the watchful maternal ears could not overhear us. And so was Dorothy.
“Oh, I don’t like the choice,” she said, “that marriage presents—nowadays.”
“A choice!” I repeated with irreverent levity. “You haven’t come to that yet, I trust. But what do you think the choice is going to be?”
“You may laugh,” said Dorothy, “but we all know well enough. We don’t have to wait till we have made it, to know what the choice is. It is either a ‘good American husband,’ ten or twenty years older than you, who has a fine position and a character and nice middle-aged friends, and can give you a home and a social circle and clothes and things—but hasn’t anything to say to you. He simply hasn’t anything to say to you.”