“I am sick of these squabbles!” he exclaimed, lighting a candle in the library and flinging himself into an arm-chair. “Sick of these personalities, hints, innuendos, and aspersions. Oh for the wings of a dove! Why can’t my wife leave them alone? My word is pledged to them, and she knows it, but is for ever bursting into our sense of honour with sharp charges and reckless attacks.”
“It was to be expected,” said I; “but give her time, and she will become inured to the new state of things.”
“So far as the comfort of my home is concerned, these rows can’t last longer than to-night. To-morrow Curling takes his wife into lodgings.”
“Small blame to him. He is really to be pitied. I have heard that mothers-in-law are bad enough company to live with, even when they have graced the marriage service with their consenting presence, and sobbed over the bridegroom’s impossible promises. But what they are when their daughters are married in defiance of them, I can only dimly and fearfully guess.”
“Ay, it is too true. Relations ought not to live together after they get married. Deeply offended as I am, I haven’t the heart to turn upon the young couple. Who are we to throw stones? Who are we to fill the judgment seat? Life stretches before them; there are, there must be, many sorrows on the road, and hard trials, and bitter tears. Whether we forgive them or not, it is unhappily only too certain that the future will make them more than expiate the vexation and disappointment they have caused us. No, no! I am not for exacting penances. I am not for grinding young hearts down because they have betrayed their owners into folly. Conny does love that young man amazingly. I see it in every movement of her head, in every look she gives him. He too is very fond of her. Argue as you will, there was sound truth in what he just now said. He is a plodding, mechanical-minded fellow, devoted to his interests, and a thorough business-man; and it could be no ordinary passion that turned his habits awry, and set him defying fortune for the privilege of possessing a pretty girl.”
“No, indeed; for he had no reason to suppose that you would give Conny a penny, or that you would allow him to resume his duties. He is no doubt sincere.”
“I found them in mean lodgings out of Bloomsbury,” said my uncle. “Yet, miserable as was their accommodation, and penniless as they avowed themselves to be, nothing could have induced them to return with me, but my repeated promises that they would be kindly received and forgiven. What a thing is love!” he cried, flinging open the window to get some air. “Imagine it not only powerful enough to drive a delicate girl, who has been coddled all her life, out of a luxurious country home, into squalid London lodgings, but to make her perfectly satisfied with her dirty quarters! Do you see anything in Mr. Curling to fall in love with? I’ll be hanged if I do.”
“Oh, woman’s caprice is an old song set to a tune to which men have been capering for many thousand years. Wasn’t Eve glad to be turned out of Paradise? we have only Milton’s word for it, that she cried. Conny finds her Theodore lovely—and there’s an end. Women, like birds, will build their nests in the queerest places. You can’t reason with them. They obey an instinct that was implanted, in order that the ugliest man might not be mateless.”
“I hope my wife is not scolding. She will make that young man hate her. And then good-bye to all our chances of persuading the neighbours that we don’t consider the marriage a calamity. What did you say to her last night?”
I told him as well as I could remember.