Rashleigh Allerton, being of the easy-going type, had no objection to her getting her own way, but he sometimes rebelled against her manner of taking it. So rebelling now, he tried to give her to understand that he was master.
“If you marry me, Barbe, you’ll have to take me as I am—disgusting habits and all.”
It was the wrong tone, the whip to the filly that should have been steered gently.
“But I suppose there’s no law to compel me to marry you.”
“Only the law of honor.”
Her whole personality was aflame. “You talk of honor!”
“Yes I talk of it. Why shouldn’t I?”
“Do you know anything about it?”
“Would you marry a man who didn’t?”
“I haven’t married any one—as yet.”
“But you’re going to marry me, I presume.”
“Considering the facts, that’s a good deal in the way of presumption, isn’t it?”
They reached the place to which they came once in every few weeks, where each had the impulse to hurt the other cruelly.
“If it’s so much presumption as all that,” he demanded, “what’s the meaning of that ring?”
7
“Oh, I don’t have to go on wearing it.” Crossing the room she pulled it off and held it out toward him “Do you want it back?”
He shrank away from her. “Don’t be a fool Barbe. You may go too far.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of—that I’ve gone too far already.”
“In what way?”
“In the way that’s brought us face to face like this. If I’d never promised to marry you I shouldn’t now have to—to reconsider.”
“Oh, so that’s it. You’re reconsidering.”
“Don’t you see that I have to? If you make me as unhappy as you can before marriage, what’ll it be afterward?”
“And how happy are you making me?”
Holding the ring between the thumb and forefinger of the right hand, she played at putting it back, without doing it. “So there you are! Isn’t that another reason for reconsidering—for both of us?”
“Don’t you care anything about me?”
“You make it difficult—after such an exhibition as that of last night, right before Aunt Marion. Can’t you imagine that there are situations in which I feel ashamed?”
It was then that he spoke the words which changed the current of his life. “And can’t you imagine that there are situations in which I resent being badgered by a bitter-tongued old maid, to say nothing of a girl––” He knew how “crazy” he was, but the habit of getting beyond his own control was one of long standing—“to say nothing of a girl who’s 8 more like an old maid than a woman going to be married.”
With a renewed attempt at being master he pointed at the ring which she was still holding within an inch of its finger. “Put that back.”
“I think not.”
“Then if you don’t––”
“Well—what?”
Plunging his hands into the pockets of his coat, he began tearing up and down the room. “Look here, Barbe. This kind of thing can’t possibly go on.”
“Which is what I’m trying to tell you, isn’t it?”
“Very well, then; we can stop it.”
“Certainly—in one way.”
“The way of getting married, with no more shilly-shallying about it.”
“On the principle that if you’re hanging over a precipice the best thing you can do is to fall.”
He continued to race up and down the room, all nerves and frenzy. “Don’t we care about each other?”
She answered carefully. “I think you care about me to the extent that you believe I’d make a good mistress of the house your mother left you, and which, you say, is like an empty sepulcher. If you didn’t have it on your hands, I don’t imagine it would have occurred to you to ask me.”
“Well, that’s all right. Now what about you?”
“You’ve already answered that question for yourself.” She stiffened haughtily. “I’m an old maid. I haven’t been brought up by Aunt Marion for nothing. I’ve an old maid’s ways and outlooks and habits. I resented your saying it a minute ago, and yet it’s 9 true. I’ve known for years that it was true. It wouldn’t be fair for me to marry any man. So here it is, Rash.” Crossing the floor-space she held out the ring again. “You might as well take it first as last.”
He drew back from her, his features screwed up like those of a tragic mask. “Do you mean it?”
“Do I seem to be making a joke?”
Averting his face, he swept the mere sight of the ring away from him. “I won’t touch the thing.”
“And I can’t keep it. So there!”
It fell with a little shivery sound to a bare spot on the floor, rolling to the edge of a rug, where it stopped. Each looked down at it.
“So you mean to send me to the devil! All right! Just watch and you’ll see me go.”
She was walking away from him, but turned again. “If you mean by that that you put the responsibility for your abominable life on me––”
“Abominable life! Me! Just because I’m not one of the white-blooded Nancies which your aunt thinks the only ones fit to be called men––”
But he couldn’t go on. He was choking. The sole relief to his indignation was in once more tearing round the room, while Miss Walbrook moved to the fluted white mantelpiece, where, with her foot resting on the attenuated Hunt Diedrich andirons she bowed her head against an attenuated Hunt Diedrich antelope in bronze.
She was not softened or repentant. She knew she would become so later; but she knew too that her tempers had to work themselves off by degrees. Their 10 quarrels having hitherto been rendered worth while by their reconciliations, she took it for granted that the same thing would happen once more though, as she expressed it to herself, she would have died before taking the first step. The obvious thing was for him to pick up the ring from off the floor, bring it to her humbly while her back was turned on him, and beseech her to allow him to slip it on where it belonged; whereupon she would consider as to whether she would do so or not. In her present frame of mind, so she told herself, she would not. Nothing would induce her to do anything of the kind. He had betrayed the fact that he knew something as to which she was desperately sensitive, which other people knew, but which she had always supposed to have escaped his observation—that she was like an old maid.
She was. She was only twenty-five, but she had been like an old maid at fifteen. It had been a joke till she was twenty, after which it had continued as a joke to her friends, but a grief to herself. She was distinguished, aristocratic, intellectual, accomplished, and Aunt Marion would probably see to it that she was left tolerably well off; nevertheless she had picked up from her aunt, or