IIIGEORGE MARRIED’Tis an evil lot, and yetLet us make the best of it;If love can live when pleasure diesWe two will love, till in our eyesThis heart’s Hell seem paradise.GEORGEmarried and settled in the newly developed region behind Hog Lane West. Before he went, he spent a whole evening with his mother and brother making a list of his possessions, and arguing with them when they claimed a chair or a piece of china he had bought as family property. They had been purchased withhismoney, and they had only enjoyed a right of user.—(His firm had been through protracted litigation in the Chancery Courts, and he was up in legal phrases.)—They must have known that sooner or later he would have a house of his own. The procuring of a wife seemed to have aggravated George’s acquisitive sense. He was exceedingly conscious of the extension of his personality and was groping round for material things wherewith to fortify it. More and more he treated his brother with condescension, and was continually hinting at thethings marriage did for a man. He had not been so grossly jubilant since his first encounter with woman, whereof he had given René a full and rapturous account. René had been more able to understand that excitement than this. To George the two adventures were apparently of the same order; to René they were profoundly different, and his brother’s boisterousness induced misery in him. What his mother made of it all, he could not discover. All day long, and often late at night she was crocheting at a bed-quilt which she was anxious to have finished against the wedding. The savage communicativeness which had so disturbed René on the night of his home-coming was succeeded by silence and silly chatter, and she was constantly and mysteriously busy at George’s house or with Elsie at the shops.Cathleen Bentley had written:“How can you have such a brother? But he is great fun. Tell me more. And I adore your mother. If only we could be engaged, I would come and stay with you.”René described:“George keeps hinting at Things in marriage. He is rather like a man dreaming of good food, a series of meals magically prepared and set before him so that he does not need to rise. One meal is cleared away and another appears. I find it hard to grasp. I imagine his life otherwise must be dull, though he never seems to mind that. He is what you call Steady; has been in the same office since he was sixteen, and will go on in it until he is sixty and past work. Perhapsall his desire and hope go into this adventure. Perhaps he feels that nothing lies beyond it, and is therefore cramming everything into it. Certainly he is not allowing himself room to develop anything out of it. There’s a sort of desperation in him. Now or never. After all, I suppose he’s getting what he wants, but there is a heat in it which blisters me. That must be because I have known a cool, sweet love with you. How did it happen? You must try to understand, look down into the lives of people on a lower level than your own. We have no organized pleasures, at least not enough of them, and we are really thrown back on the man and maiden business, casual for the most part. We feel the grubbiness of it, but they don’t. It’s fire and warmth to them. Primitive, isn’t it? Like savages rubbing two sticks together. It doesn’t leave much room for affection or charm. It has to be raw or they can’t believe in it, inarticulate as they are, and as I am too often. We can’t make material existence a starting-point as you more favored ones can do if you choose. Love simply doesn’t have a chance with us. I think you could bring a wonderful happiness into my mother’s life. I keep wanting to tell her about you, and one of these days I shall. Will you send her some flowers from your garden? We have a backyard only with five privet bushes growing round an old bicycle shed. . . .”Writing to Cathleen was his safety-valve. He could find George amusing when he had written to her, and when he had a letter from her he could almost salute his brother as a fellow-lover.The wedding was a noble piece of work. It was at St. Clement’s in Upper Kite Street, not a hundred yards away from the Denmark, where there was a rousing breakfast to which Mr. Sherman had invited his cronies and patrons. There were ponderous jokes about perambulators, and George, in an excited little speech, said that when he had a house large enough to accommodate all his family, he would be able to invite those friends who had come to see him and his Elsie married. Two or three old women wept; rice, confetti, and slippers were thrown after the happy pair as they drove off for their honeymoon, and in the afternoon the party went by train to Cheadley Edge and visited the caves, and wandered in the woods, and ate an enormous high tea at Yarker’s, the farmhouse which devoted one of its meadows to cocoanut-shies and roundabouts, and its garden to tea-parties. It was all good, vulgar, noisy fun, and René was caught in a series of flirtations with Elsie’s sisters and their friends. He kept finding their hands in his as they swung or walked or sat at tea, and they seemed to enter into a competition to be isolated with him in the woods or the caves, but not one of them established an exclusive right to him for the day, and by the return in the evening the party was split up into couples and he found himself thrown with his mother, who had throughout shown a stiff front to pleasantries and was exhausted by jollifications which for her had not been jolly.Sitting by her side in the tram as they drove from the station, René found himself dreading the return toHog Lane West. George had been an alien, but a convenient buffer between them. Now they had to establish a new order of living. George’s absence was an actuality with which they had to deal more vigorously than with his presence. They left his room empty. Neither had any use for it. The dining-room had been the living-room of the family. Without George, René and his mother found themselves relapsing into oppressive silences, and very soon he took to leaving her in the evenings, and going up to his bedroom and his books and his work.He was singularly friendless. His schoolmates had gone into offices and regarded with strange and rather alarmed eyes his continued pursuit of academic courses, and in his first years at the university he had undergone a violent spasm of mental growth which had left him shy and diffident, resentful of anything that seemed like intrusion upon his brooding, and impatient of surface relationships and the too easy friendliness which he saw current on all sides. Also he was chafed by his position of semi-dependence upon his relations, and rather scared by the possibility of not doing well enough in his examinations to justify what was constantly being impressed upon him as his exceptional opportunity. Therefore he worked on a time-table in term and out of it, never less than nine hours a day; morning, afternoon, and evening; and rather harder in vacation than in term. He had no smallest notion what it was all for. He had an unusual faculty for learning things and arrangements of ideas, and could always answer examination questionslucidly, and had so small a conceit of himself that his work was never spoiled by a nervous anxiety to excel nor interfered with by the emotionalism of the clever young. He had a sound, all-round ability, never expected anything to be difficult, and could quickly master the elements of any study he took up. When that study led away from practical considerations he was apt to lose interest in it. He had stopped short of philosophy and pure mathematics, and the astuteness of his headmaster had led him in his last year at school to specialize in history and economics. When he was sent up for a scholarship at Cambridge, he failed because the beauty of the Backs had so stirred his rather sluggish emotions as to cause him temporarily to lose his lucidity and shrewdness in dealing with examination questions, so that he wrote rather at large—thoroughly enjoying himself—than with particular reference to the matter in hand. However, he had already won a County Council Scholarship, and with this he entered Thrigsby University. There he had done well and had picked up exhibitions and bursaries, striving for success not so much because he wanted it, as because it was expected of him.He lived now in a strange disquietude, reading his set books, Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Marshall, Cannan, Jevons, various works by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, amusing himself with the advanced diagrammatic economists, and grinding away at his special subject, Coöperation, from the Rochdale pioneers to the European “movement.” All this he did mechanically.His brain had been set going in a certain direction by amiable instructors whom he had never seen any reason to doubt, and it was pleasant to let it go on so moving toward that examination which was to be a gate leading to a profession higher than the life of commerce from which he had been reclaimed.So far, so good; but George’s marriage had caused a stir-about in him. In the first place, it posed a domestic problem in economics that could not be solved on paper, and in the second it had roused him to moral revolt. He could not forget his affection for George. They had been great companions as little boys. He himself was in love, knew that love was sweet, and could not away with the fact that George’s marriage was to some extent a denial of all he had learned and gained in his own hours of tenderness. He hated to resist the idea that George was perfectly happy, but he could not help himself. His was no literary enthusiasm for romance and noble love. He had read very few romances, and of poetry he knew no more than the anthology to which Cathleen had introduced him. On the whole, he preferred comfort above all things, and George made him uncomfortable, set stirring in him an idealism, a fervor, which so swelled in him as to make him, even in his outpourings to his beloved, incapable of stringing his ideas together. Literary persons can gain a great deal of relief by the mere reiteration of the words “I love you,” with variations. Words were to René only implements, painfully inadequate, for digging out the fineness which he had begun to perceive behind his feelings.He could not forgive George for being content with mere feelings undisciplined and unrefined. He hoped innocently that the honeymoon would bring some revelation, but when bride and bridegroom returned they were more distressing than ever. They had lost their shyness. That was all. George was fatly, complacently “settled down,” and could never leave his wife alone for half an hour on end, but must be always touching her, teasing her, or openly caressing her, and she seemed to like it and to make a parade of his attentions.René would come away boiling from an evening spent at their house, which they had called The Nest, and he would sit, either cooling himself with his large books, or heightening his fury with letters to Cathleen, now returned to Putney, which is called London. He never revised what he wrote. He had rather forgotten the charm of his boyish love-making, and had lost the young trick of visualizing his fair, needing more from her than her beauty, and now used her as an outlet, assuming in her a sympathy which neither her past conduct nor her letters revealed. The mere fact of writing was enough, and his letters became intimate and self-revelatory, a kind of running, general confession. Sometimes they were of enormous length, and the envelopes he sent away were bulky and bulging.One night he stopped in the middle of a letter, turned back and read, realizing that he had laid bare the whole of his brother’s sexual life so far as he knew it. He was filled with a thick horror, tore the letterup, and went down to his mother to escape from the train of thought which had led to such indiscretion and betrayal. He did not escape, but found himself plunged in confession:“Mother, I’m in love.”“Well, I never! You’re not going to be married now?”“No. It’s hopeless. She’s rich. At least her father is.”“So that’s why you look so queerly at Elsie. You can’t expect them to be all alike.”“It isn’t only that. Only I can’t get away from certain things.”“What things?”“The horrible things people do.”“You’ll be kept busy if you worry about that.”“It’s about myself.”“Want to confess? Go on.”“I mean, George and I used to talk—you know. Well, it got beyond talk. Uncle Alfred gave me ten shillings once. I spent it—that way.”“Well, well.”“You can’t dismiss it like that. I shouldn’t be remembering it if it were so easy as that. I met her—you know—in Derby Street——”“You’re not going to tell me the whole story?”“I must tell someone. I met her and she took me down a lot of streets. She walked along briskly in a business-like way, and I slunk along behind with my coat collar turned up and my cap over my eyes, and I kept shivering, though it wasn’t cold. We came to alittle house and she knocked at the door, and a fat woman with red arms came to it. She just looked at us and said: ‘Full up.’ We went on to another little house, but I couldn’t get that out of my mind, and the room there was so horrible that I ran away, and that’s all.”Mrs. Fourmy looked up at the clock, into the fire, round at the corner cupboard. At last she said:“Well, you are a funny boy.”“I’m in love all right,” he said; “but I fed as if I’d never like to marry and just go on with you forever and ever. I could find a sort of happiness in just making enough for us to live on.”His mother came over to him and laid her hands on his shoulders:“Don’t make trouble for yourself, my dear. Don’t do that. Let things alone. Trouble comes fast enough, and all your plans and thoughts and hopes aren’t enough to deal with them. That’s your father all over. Always wanting a little better than he got, and always getting a little worse than he deserved. Suppose we go out together once a week. That’ll stop us getting into the way of sitting too much alone. And if the girl’s the right sort of girl she won’t let being rich and all that stand in her way.”René patted her hand.“It’s awfully good of you to listen,” he said; “I feel better already. Only George——”“Don’t let George worry you. He can do things you can’t. George can keep his mind out of things like that.”He felt immensely relieved. His confession seemed to have filled the vacancy left by George. Between himself and his mother there was established a more living relationship. There had been some authority in her comfortable words which had led him back to the old unconsidered position in which she was the central warmth of the home in which he lived. For a time at least he could be at rest and accept that things were so because they were so and not otherwise.Gradually they won back to happy insignificant chatter, and planned that on the following evening they would go to a music-hall together.The postman broke in upon their talk. He brought two letters for René. One was from Cathleen, and very short:“There’s been a row. I’ve been howling all night. I can’t write any more. They can’t understand. Vulgar they call you, and they are furious with me. They read one of your letters, opened it if you please. Not fit for a young girl. I’m not to have a heart till I can captivate a rich man old or young, and I am never to have a mind. It’s just beastly the things they say, but I can do nothing.”The other letter was from her mother:“DEARSIR,—I have read your last letter to my daughter. It is not fit reading for a young girl, or indeed for any pure woman. You will oblige me by not writing again, and I have forbidden my daughter to continue your acquaintance.”He passed both letters over to his mother.“I told you it was hopeless.”“If you ask my opinion,” replied his mother, “I should say you were well rid of her.”“But I can’t help loving her.”Mrs. Fourmy sniffed indignantly:“Love! Well, you can call it love if you like.”“I do,” said he very earnestly.On which his mother staggered him by saying:“George wouldn’t.”In spite of himself, and against the grain, René began to think a little enviously of his brother, master unperplexed of his own and another life.
’Tis an evil lot, and yetLet us make the best of it;If love can live when pleasure diesWe two will love, till in our eyesThis heart’s Hell seem paradise.
’Tis an evil lot, and yet
Let us make the best of it;
If love can live when pleasure dies
We two will love, till in our eyes
This heart’s Hell seem paradise.
GEORGEmarried and settled in the newly developed region behind Hog Lane West. Before he went, he spent a whole evening with his mother and brother making a list of his possessions, and arguing with them when they claimed a chair or a piece of china he had bought as family property. They had been purchased withhismoney, and they had only enjoyed a right of user.—(His firm had been through protracted litigation in the Chancery Courts, and he was up in legal phrases.)—They must have known that sooner or later he would have a house of his own. The procuring of a wife seemed to have aggravated George’s acquisitive sense. He was exceedingly conscious of the extension of his personality and was groping round for material things wherewith to fortify it. More and more he treated his brother with condescension, and was continually hinting at thethings marriage did for a man. He had not been so grossly jubilant since his first encounter with woman, whereof he had given René a full and rapturous account. René had been more able to understand that excitement than this. To George the two adventures were apparently of the same order; to René they were profoundly different, and his brother’s boisterousness induced misery in him. What his mother made of it all, he could not discover. All day long, and often late at night she was crocheting at a bed-quilt which she was anxious to have finished against the wedding. The savage communicativeness which had so disturbed René on the night of his home-coming was succeeded by silence and silly chatter, and she was constantly and mysteriously busy at George’s house or with Elsie at the shops.
Cathleen Bentley had written:
“How can you have such a brother? But he is great fun. Tell me more. And I adore your mother. If only we could be engaged, I would come and stay with you.”
René described:
“George keeps hinting at Things in marriage. He is rather like a man dreaming of good food, a series of meals magically prepared and set before him so that he does not need to rise. One meal is cleared away and another appears. I find it hard to grasp. I imagine his life otherwise must be dull, though he never seems to mind that. He is what you call Steady; has been in the same office since he was sixteen, and will go on in it until he is sixty and past work. Perhapsall his desire and hope go into this adventure. Perhaps he feels that nothing lies beyond it, and is therefore cramming everything into it. Certainly he is not allowing himself room to develop anything out of it. There’s a sort of desperation in him. Now or never. After all, I suppose he’s getting what he wants, but there is a heat in it which blisters me. That must be because I have known a cool, sweet love with you. How did it happen? You must try to understand, look down into the lives of people on a lower level than your own. We have no organized pleasures, at least not enough of them, and we are really thrown back on the man and maiden business, casual for the most part. We feel the grubbiness of it, but they don’t. It’s fire and warmth to them. Primitive, isn’t it? Like savages rubbing two sticks together. It doesn’t leave much room for affection or charm. It has to be raw or they can’t believe in it, inarticulate as they are, and as I am too often. We can’t make material existence a starting-point as you more favored ones can do if you choose. Love simply doesn’t have a chance with us. I think you could bring a wonderful happiness into my mother’s life. I keep wanting to tell her about you, and one of these days I shall. Will you send her some flowers from your garden? We have a backyard only with five privet bushes growing round an old bicycle shed. . . .”
Writing to Cathleen was his safety-valve. He could find George amusing when he had written to her, and when he had a letter from her he could almost salute his brother as a fellow-lover.
The wedding was a noble piece of work. It was at St. Clement’s in Upper Kite Street, not a hundred yards away from the Denmark, where there was a rousing breakfast to which Mr. Sherman had invited his cronies and patrons. There were ponderous jokes about perambulators, and George, in an excited little speech, said that when he had a house large enough to accommodate all his family, he would be able to invite those friends who had come to see him and his Elsie married. Two or three old women wept; rice, confetti, and slippers were thrown after the happy pair as they drove off for their honeymoon, and in the afternoon the party went by train to Cheadley Edge and visited the caves, and wandered in the woods, and ate an enormous high tea at Yarker’s, the farmhouse which devoted one of its meadows to cocoanut-shies and roundabouts, and its garden to tea-parties. It was all good, vulgar, noisy fun, and René was caught in a series of flirtations with Elsie’s sisters and their friends. He kept finding their hands in his as they swung or walked or sat at tea, and they seemed to enter into a competition to be isolated with him in the woods or the caves, but not one of them established an exclusive right to him for the day, and by the return in the evening the party was split up into couples and he found himself thrown with his mother, who had throughout shown a stiff front to pleasantries and was exhausted by jollifications which for her had not been jolly.
Sitting by her side in the tram as they drove from the station, René found himself dreading the return toHog Lane West. George had been an alien, but a convenient buffer between them. Now they had to establish a new order of living. George’s absence was an actuality with which they had to deal more vigorously than with his presence. They left his room empty. Neither had any use for it. The dining-room had been the living-room of the family. Without George, René and his mother found themselves relapsing into oppressive silences, and very soon he took to leaving her in the evenings, and going up to his bedroom and his books and his work.
He was singularly friendless. His schoolmates had gone into offices and regarded with strange and rather alarmed eyes his continued pursuit of academic courses, and in his first years at the university he had undergone a violent spasm of mental growth which had left him shy and diffident, resentful of anything that seemed like intrusion upon his brooding, and impatient of surface relationships and the too easy friendliness which he saw current on all sides. Also he was chafed by his position of semi-dependence upon his relations, and rather scared by the possibility of not doing well enough in his examinations to justify what was constantly being impressed upon him as his exceptional opportunity. Therefore he worked on a time-table in term and out of it, never less than nine hours a day; morning, afternoon, and evening; and rather harder in vacation than in term. He had no smallest notion what it was all for. He had an unusual faculty for learning things and arrangements of ideas, and could always answer examination questionslucidly, and had so small a conceit of himself that his work was never spoiled by a nervous anxiety to excel nor interfered with by the emotionalism of the clever young. He had a sound, all-round ability, never expected anything to be difficult, and could quickly master the elements of any study he took up. When that study led away from practical considerations he was apt to lose interest in it. He had stopped short of philosophy and pure mathematics, and the astuteness of his headmaster had led him in his last year at school to specialize in history and economics. When he was sent up for a scholarship at Cambridge, he failed because the beauty of the Backs had so stirred his rather sluggish emotions as to cause him temporarily to lose his lucidity and shrewdness in dealing with examination questions, so that he wrote rather at large—thoroughly enjoying himself—than with particular reference to the matter in hand. However, he had already won a County Council Scholarship, and with this he entered Thrigsby University. There he had done well and had picked up exhibitions and bursaries, striving for success not so much because he wanted it, as because it was expected of him.
He lived now in a strange disquietude, reading his set books, Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Marshall, Cannan, Jevons, various works by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, amusing himself with the advanced diagrammatic economists, and grinding away at his special subject, Coöperation, from the Rochdale pioneers to the European “movement.” All this he did mechanically.His brain had been set going in a certain direction by amiable instructors whom he had never seen any reason to doubt, and it was pleasant to let it go on so moving toward that examination which was to be a gate leading to a profession higher than the life of commerce from which he had been reclaimed.
So far, so good; but George’s marriage had caused a stir-about in him. In the first place, it posed a domestic problem in economics that could not be solved on paper, and in the second it had roused him to moral revolt. He could not forget his affection for George. They had been great companions as little boys. He himself was in love, knew that love was sweet, and could not away with the fact that George’s marriage was to some extent a denial of all he had learned and gained in his own hours of tenderness. He hated to resist the idea that George was perfectly happy, but he could not help himself. His was no literary enthusiasm for romance and noble love. He had read very few romances, and of poetry he knew no more than the anthology to which Cathleen had introduced him. On the whole, he preferred comfort above all things, and George made him uncomfortable, set stirring in him an idealism, a fervor, which so swelled in him as to make him, even in his outpourings to his beloved, incapable of stringing his ideas together. Literary persons can gain a great deal of relief by the mere reiteration of the words “I love you,” with variations. Words were to René only implements, painfully inadequate, for digging out the fineness which he had begun to perceive behind his feelings.He could not forgive George for being content with mere feelings undisciplined and unrefined. He hoped innocently that the honeymoon would bring some revelation, but when bride and bridegroom returned they were more distressing than ever. They had lost their shyness. That was all. George was fatly, complacently “settled down,” and could never leave his wife alone for half an hour on end, but must be always touching her, teasing her, or openly caressing her, and she seemed to like it and to make a parade of his attentions.
René would come away boiling from an evening spent at their house, which they had called The Nest, and he would sit, either cooling himself with his large books, or heightening his fury with letters to Cathleen, now returned to Putney, which is called London. He never revised what he wrote. He had rather forgotten the charm of his boyish love-making, and had lost the young trick of visualizing his fair, needing more from her than her beauty, and now used her as an outlet, assuming in her a sympathy which neither her past conduct nor her letters revealed. The mere fact of writing was enough, and his letters became intimate and self-revelatory, a kind of running, general confession. Sometimes they were of enormous length, and the envelopes he sent away were bulky and bulging.
One night he stopped in the middle of a letter, turned back and read, realizing that he had laid bare the whole of his brother’s sexual life so far as he knew it. He was filled with a thick horror, tore the letterup, and went down to his mother to escape from the train of thought which had led to such indiscretion and betrayal. He did not escape, but found himself plunged in confession:
“Mother, I’m in love.”
“Well, I never! You’re not going to be married now?”
“No. It’s hopeless. She’s rich. At least her father is.”
“So that’s why you look so queerly at Elsie. You can’t expect them to be all alike.”
“It isn’t only that. Only I can’t get away from certain things.”
“What things?”
“The horrible things people do.”
“You’ll be kept busy if you worry about that.”
“It’s about myself.”
“Want to confess? Go on.”
“I mean, George and I used to talk—you know. Well, it got beyond talk. Uncle Alfred gave me ten shillings once. I spent it—that way.”
“Well, well.”
“You can’t dismiss it like that. I shouldn’t be remembering it if it were so easy as that. I met her—you know—in Derby Street——”
“You’re not going to tell me the whole story?”
“I must tell someone. I met her and she took me down a lot of streets. She walked along briskly in a business-like way, and I slunk along behind with my coat collar turned up and my cap over my eyes, and I kept shivering, though it wasn’t cold. We came to alittle house and she knocked at the door, and a fat woman with red arms came to it. She just looked at us and said: ‘Full up.’ We went on to another little house, but I couldn’t get that out of my mind, and the room there was so horrible that I ran away, and that’s all.”
Mrs. Fourmy looked up at the clock, into the fire, round at the corner cupboard. At last she said:
“Well, you are a funny boy.”
“I’m in love all right,” he said; “but I fed as if I’d never like to marry and just go on with you forever and ever. I could find a sort of happiness in just making enough for us to live on.”
His mother came over to him and laid her hands on his shoulders:
“Don’t make trouble for yourself, my dear. Don’t do that. Let things alone. Trouble comes fast enough, and all your plans and thoughts and hopes aren’t enough to deal with them. That’s your father all over. Always wanting a little better than he got, and always getting a little worse than he deserved. Suppose we go out together once a week. That’ll stop us getting into the way of sitting too much alone. And if the girl’s the right sort of girl she won’t let being rich and all that stand in her way.”
René patted her hand.
“It’s awfully good of you to listen,” he said; “I feel better already. Only George——”
“Don’t let George worry you. He can do things you can’t. George can keep his mind out of things like that.”
He felt immensely relieved. His confession seemed to have filled the vacancy left by George. Between himself and his mother there was established a more living relationship. There had been some authority in her comfortable words which had led him back to the old unconsidered position in which she was the central warmth of the home in which he lived. For a time at least he could be at rest and accept that things were so because they were so and not otherwise.
Gradually they won back to happy insignificant chatter, and planned that on the following evening they would go to a music-hall together.
The postman broke in upon their talk. He brought two letters for René. One was from Cathleen, and very short:
“There’s been a row. I’ve been howling all night. I can’t write any more. They can’t understand. Vulgar they call you, and they are furious with me. They read one of your letters, opened it if you please. Not fit for a young girl. I’m not to have a heart till I can captivate a rich man old or young, and I am never to have a mind. It’s just beastly the things they say, but I can do nothing.”
“There’s been a row. I’ve been howling all night. I can’t write any more. They can’t understand. Vulgar they call you, and they are furious with me. They read one of your letters, opened it if you please. Not fit for a young girl. I’m not to have a heart till I can captivate a rich man old or young, and I am never to have a mind. It’s just beastly the things they say, but I can do nothing.”
The other letter was from her mother:
“DEARSIR,—I have read your last letter to my daughter. It is not fit reading for a young girl, or indeed for any pure woman. You will oblige me by not writing again, and I have forbidden my daughter to continue your acquaintance.”
“DEARSIR,—I have read your last letter to my daughter. It is not fit reading for a young girl, or indeed for any pure woman. You will oblige me by not writing again, and I have forbidden my daughter to continue your acquaintance.”
He passed both letters over to his mother.
“I told you it was hopeless.”
“If you ask my opinion,” replied his mother, “I should say you were well rid of her.”
“But I can’t help loving her.”
Mrs. Fourmy sniffed indignantly:
“Love! Well, you can call it love if you like.”
“I do,” said he very earnestly.
On which his mother staggered him by saying:
“George wouldn’t.”
In spite of himself, and against the grain, René began to think a little enviously of his brother, master unperplexed of his own and another life.