Spinster of This Parish

by W. B. Maxwell

If pushed beyond that mark and as it were forced to put on the black cap and pass a final sentence of condemnation, he said the thing was un-English.

Mr. Verinder secretly objected to his insistence on calling himself colonel, since he was not a regular soldier but merely in command of a militia or volunteer battalion attached to one of the city regiments; and he thought it childish of him to like to be addressed as Gussie instead of Augustus.

“Wouldn’t be playing the game,” said Colonel Gussie, as he finished his nectarine with relish.

Then, after saying he knew that Emmeline was not contaminated with anything of this kind, he spoke in disapproval of these modern notions that were tending to upset the feminine half of humanity—“emancipation,” “the new woman,” “equal rights,” and so on. It was one thing to like advanced education and keep yourself “up-to-date”; but this impressionist art, this Yellow Book, and all these “problem plays”—well, they did no good, did they? There was too much of the spirit of revolt in the air.

Eustace smoked his cigarette and stared at the ceiling. Mr. Verinder allowed his brother-in-law to talk, only saying once, as if to himself, “Freedom, yes, so long as it does not degenerate into license.”

Then the butler came in, and informed them that Mr. Dyke was upstairs.

The colonel rose at once, drawing himself to his full height, which was at least six feet three inches, and looking magnificent.

“Come on,” he said; and they all three went upstairs to that room behind the music-room—the room that contained the smiling landscapes by Leader. Mr. Verinder had ordered that Dyke should be shown into this room, because he felt it was large enough and yet not too large for their purposes.

In spite of the hatred, the interview opened with extreme propriety and politeness, but Mr. Verinder was at once oppressed by its incredible fantastic nature. It was as though he had not been really Mr. Verinder, here, among these smiling landscapes, in Prince’s Gate, but a person wrenched out of a land of probabilities and launched on an ocean of the impossible.

Dyke was in evening clothes, and perhaps recently his hair had been cut and his beard pointed; at any rate, that aspect of Tolstoy or the pilgrim had entirely vanished. He was standing on the hearth-rug when they came in, and he did not move; he stood there, a tall commanding figure; handsome too—with his strong nose and high cheek-bones—in a careless, dare-devil, but not swash-bucklering style; not really taller than the others, certainly less tall and very much less round than the colonel, and yet somehow dominating them and the whole room.