These two were such good friends that the most gossiping townspeople had given them up with a sigh. The doctor’s wife, a faded beauty and devoted romance reader, said one day, as they passed, ‘They are such cold creatures’; the old maid who kept the Berlin-wool shop remarked, ‘They are not of the marrying sort’; and now their comings and goings were no longed noticed. Nothing had ever come to break in on their quiet companionship and give obscurity as a dwelling-place for the needed illusions. Had one been weak and the other strong, one plain and the other handsome, one guide and the other guided, one wise and the other foolish, love might have found them out in a moment, for love is based on inequality as friendship is on equality.
‘John,’ said Mary Carton, warming her hands at the fire, ‘I have had a troublesome day. Did you come to help me teach the children to sing? It was good of you: you were just too late.’
‘No,’ he answered, ‘I have come to be your pupil. I am always your pupil.’
‘Yes, and a most disobedient one.’
‘Well, advise me this time at any rate. My uncle has written, offering me a hundred pounds a year to begin with in his London office. Am I to go?’
‘You know quite well my answer,’ she said.
‘Indeed I do not. Why should I go? I am contented here. I am now making my garden ready for spring. Later on there will be trout fishing and saunters by the edge of the river in the evening when the bats are flickering about. In July there will be races. I enjoy the bustle. I enjoy life here. When anything annoys me I keep away from it, that is all. You know I am always busy. I have occupation and friends and am quite contented.’
‘It is a great loss to many of us, but you must go, John,’ she said. ‘For you know you will be old some day, and perhaps when the vitality of youth is gone you will feel that your life is empty and find that you are too old to change it; and you will give up, perhaps, trying to be happy and likeable and become as the rest are. I think I can see you,’ she said, with a laugh, ‘a hypochondriac, like Gorman, the retired excise officer, or with a red nose like Dr. Stephens, or growing like Peters, the elderly cattle merchant, who starves his horse.’
‘They were bad material to begin with,’ he answered, ‘and, besides, I cannot take my mother away with me at her age, and I cannot leave her alone.’
‘What annoyance it may be,’ she answered, ‘will soon be forgotten. You will be able to give her many more comforts. We women—we all like to be dressed well and have pleasant rooms to sit in, and a young man at your age should not be idle. You must go away from this little backward place. We shall miss you, but you are clever and must go and work with other men and have your talents admitted.’