“I don’t know—I must have been angry. I have a beastly temper at times, you know. I suppose Georgia had made me very mad about something. Oh yes, I remember now, it was about her going to Bir-ul-Malikat. She would insist that she had a right to go, and stay too, whether I liked it or not, and she wouldn’t give in. But as for breaking off our engagement——”
“But you are convinced that Miss Keeling ought to have given in?”
“Well, I think that when she saw what a point I made of it——”
“There was no question of your giving in because she also made a point of it?”
“Oh no,” said Dick, innocently.
“Then I think it is a very good thing indeed that your engagement is broken off.” Lady Haigh spoke with her usual decision of manner, but Dick looked so absolutely astonished and appalled that she condescended to an explanation. “I should like to talk to you a little on this subject very seriously, Major North, for as a looker-on I can perhaps see more clearly than you do where you have gone wrong. I daresay you will regard me as a meddling old woman, but at any rate you can’t say that I have turned critic because I have failed in matrimony, for my married life has been as happy as even I could have wished. Besides, it was in getting the medicine to cure Sir Dugald that poor Georgie incurred your royal highness’s displeasure, so that I feel bound to do all I can to put things right between you.”
“But if you think that it is better for her not to be engaged to me?” The question was asked a little stiffly, for Dick did not altogether appreciate the tone of his monitress’s remarks.
“That is a matter which depends solely on yourself. You possess many estimable qualities, Major North, but you were born a few centuries too late. Of course I don’t mean that you were to blame for the fact—on the contrary, it is distinctly a misfortune, both to yourself and others. You would have made an ideal husband in the days when it was considered quite the proper thing for a gentleman to correct his wife with a stick not thicker than his middle finger.”
“Really, Lady Haigh, this is beyond a joke!” Dick was angry now—there was no mistaking the fact.
“Quite so; but I am not joking. I don’t mean that if you married Georgia, you would keep her in order with a horsewhip—I don’t for a moment believe she would let you, for one thing. But I think you would certainly need some resource of the kind to fall back upon if your ideal of domestic discipline was to be maintained. In your house, according to your theory, there would be one law and one will, and that law would be your law, and that will your will. That is a beautiful ideal—for you—and it would no doubt produce, in course of time, a saintly submissiveness of character in your wife. But any woman who is to be subjected to such a course of training ought to be warned beforehand, and agree to accept it with her eyes open. And that Georgia would never do.”