Peace with Honour

by Sydney C. Grier

“This is the New Woman’s idea of marriage!” sneered Dick.

“It is my view of it, at any rate. Did you expect to find in me a slave without any will of her own, Dick? I am not a young girl, but a woman, who has led a sufficiently lonely and independent life, and you knew that when you asked me to marry you.”

“Yes, and I was a fool to do it,” said Dick, roughly.

Georgia turned away, deeply wounded, and he stood at the lattice, looking out over the desert with gloomy eyes. She did not know that more had happened to try his temper than even the hardships and anxiety of which Lady Haigh had spoken. An ill-advised comrade, who had heard of his engagement through Mr Hicks, had seen fit to chaff him that morning on the eagerness with which he had pressed forward to rescue a lady who neither wanted his help nor desired his presence, and the words had rankled in his mind. But although Georgia was ignorant of this fact, she could not consent to leave things in their present state. To take offence at his hasty speech, and break off her engagement there and then, would be a course of conduct worthy only of a mythical lady who always acted the part of an awful warning for Georgia and her friends, and whom they were in the habit of calling “The Early Victorian Female.” It is, perhaps, needless to add that this person was given to gushing over indifferent poetry, fainted with great regularity at the most inconvenient moments, and when she had a misunderstanding with her lover, accepted the fact meekly, and pined away and died. Georgia felt it morally impossible to imitate her. To what purpose had been her own education and her experience of life if they did not enable her to stoop to conquer, and to hold her own without being aggressive? Was all that had passed between herself and Dick to be blotted out by a few words spoken in a moment of irritation? She crossed the room to his side and put her hands on his shoulders.

She crossed the room to his side and put her hands on his shoulders.

“Look at me, Dick,” she said. But Dick would not turn round.

“You goad a man into saying beastly things to you,” he muttered, “and then you try and get round him when he is feeling ashamed of himself.”

Such an unpromising reception of her effort to make peace might well have daunted Georgia, but she could forgive much to Dick, simply because he was Dick. She turned his moody face towards hers and made him look at her.

“Don’t think of it any more, Dick,” she said. “My dear boy, do you imagine I don’t care for you enough to forgive you that? And let us leave the question of our married life to right itself. If it hadn’t been for this, we should have glided into it naturally, and things would have settled themselves. Surely two people who are neither of them by nature quarrelsome, and who are anxious to do right, ought to be able to get on together, if both are willing to give and take? I can trust you, Dick; won’t you trust me?”