“I will no longer attempt to set myself up as a gentleman,” he said. “I am a common man, and your ladyship’s hi recognizes me as such and is not to be deceived. But don’t go for to say that I am not candid when I am as candid as ever you will let me be. What fault, if any, do you find with my putting the skates on the young ladies, and carryin’ the campstool for them?”
“If you are a gentleman,” said Miss Wilson, reddening, “your conduct in persisting in these antics in my presence is insulting to me. Extremely so.”
“Miss Wilson,” he replied, unruffled, “if you insist on Smilash, you shall have Smilash; I take an insane pleasure in personating him. If you want Sidney — my real Christian name — you can command him. But allow me to say that you must have either one or the other. If you become frank with me, I will understand that you are addressing Sidney. If distant and severe, Smilash.”
“No matter what your name may be,” said Miss Wilson, much annoyed, “I forbid you to come here or to hold any communication whatever with the young ladies in my charge.”
“Why?”
“Because I choose.”
“There is much force in that reason, Miss Wilson; but it is not moral force in the sense conveyed by your college prospectus, which I have read with great interest.”
Miss Wilson, since her quarrel with Agatha, had been sore on the subject of moral force. “No one is admitted here,” she said, “without a trustworthy introduction or recommendation. A disguise is not a satisfactory substitute for either.”
“Disguises are generally assumed for the purpose of concealing crime,” he remarked sententiously.
“Precisely so,” she said emphatically.
“Therefore, I bear, to say the least, a doubtful character. Nevertheless, I have formed with some of the students here a slight acquaintance, of which, it seems, you disapprove. You have given me no good reason why I should discontinue that acquaintance, and you cannot control me except by your wish — a sort of influence not usually effective with doubtful characters. Suppose I disregard your wish, and that one or two of your pupils come to you and say: ‘Miss Wilson, in our opinion Smilash is an excellent fellow; we find his conversation most improving. As it is your principle to allow us to exercise our own judgment, we intend to cultivate the acquaintance of Smilash.’ How will you act in that case?”
“Send them home to their parents at once.”
“I see that your principles are those of the Church of England. You allow the students the right of private judgment on condition that they arrive at the same conclusions as you. Excuse my saying that the principles of the Church of England, however excellent, are not those your prospectus led me to hope for. Your plan is coercion, stark and simple.”
“I do not admit it,” said Miss Wilson, ready to argue, even with Smilash, in defence of her system. “The girls are quite at liberty to act as they please, but I reserve my equal liberty to exclude them from my college if I do not approve of their behavior.”
“Just so. In most schools children are perfectly at liberty to learn their lessons or not, just as they please; but the principal reserves an equal liberty to whip them if they cannot repeat their tasks.”
“I do not whip my pupils,” said Miss Wilson indignantly. “The comparison is an outrage.”
“But you expel them; and, as they are devoted to you and to the place, expulsion is a dreaded punishment. Yours is the old system of making laws and enforcing them by penalties, and the superiority of Alton College to other colleges is due, not to any difference of system, but to the comparative reasonableness of its laws and the mildness and judgment with which they are enforced.”
“My system is radically different from the old one. However, I will not discuss the matter with you. A mind occupied with the prejudices of the old coercive despotism can naturally only see in the new a modification of the old, instead of, as my system is, an entire reversal or abandonment of it.”
He shook his head sadly and said: “You seek to impose your ideas on others, ostracizing those who reject them. Believe me, mankind has been doing nothing else ever since it began to pay some attention to ideas. It has been said that a benevolent despotism is the best possible form of government. I do not believe that saying, because I believe another one to the effect that hell is paved with benevolence, which most people, the proverb being too deep for them, misinterpret as unfulfilled intentions. As if a benevolent despot might not by any error of judgment destroy his kingdom, and then say, like Romeo when he got his friend killed, ‘I thought all for the best!’ Excuse my rambling. I meant to say, in short, that though you are benevolent and judicious you are none the less a despot.”
Miss Wilson, at a loss for a reply, regretted that she had not, before letting him gain so far on her, dismissed him summarily instead of tolerating a discussion which she did not know how to end with dignity. He relieved her by adding unexpectedly:
“Your system was the cause of my absurd marriage. My wife acquired a degree of culture and reasonableness from her training here which made her seem a superior being among the chatterers who form the female seasoning in ordinary society. I admired her dark eyes, and was only too glad to seize the excuse her education offered me for believing her a match for me in mind as well as in body.”
Miss Wilson, astonished, determined to tell him coldly that her time was valuable. But curiosity took possession of her in the act of utterance, and the words that came were, “Who was she?”
“Henrietta Jansenius. She is Henrietta Trefusis, and I am Sidney Trefusis, at your mercy. I see I have aroused your compassion at last.”
“Nonsense!” said Miss Wilson hastily; for her surprise was indeed tinged by a feeling that he was thrown away on Henrietta.
“I ran away from her and adopted this retreat and this disguise in order to avoid her. The usual rebuke to human forethought followed. I ran straight into her arms — or rather she ran into mine. You remember the scene, and were probably puzzled by it.”
“You seem to think your marriage contract a very light matter, Mr. Trefusis. May I ask whose fault was the separation? Hers, of course.”
“I have nothing to reproach her with. I expected to find her temper hasty, but it was not so — her behavior was unexceptionable. So was mine. Our bliss was perfect, but unfortunately, I was not made for domestic bliss — at all events I could not endure it — so I fled, and when she caught me again I could give no excuse for my flight, though I made it clear to her that I would not resume our connubial relations just yet. We parted on bad terms. I fully intended to write her a sweet letter to make her forgive me in spite of herself, but somehow the weeks have slipped away and I am still fully intending. She has never written, and I have never written. This is a pretty state of things, isn’t it, Miss Wilson, after all her advantages under the influence of moral force and the movement for the higher education of women?”
“By your own admission, the fault seems to lie upon your moral training and not upon hers.”
“The fault was in the conditions of our association. Why they should have attracted me so strongly at first, and repelled me so horribly afterwards, is one of those devil’s riddles which will not be answered until we shall have traced all the yet unsuspected reactions of our inveterate dishonesty. But I am wasting your time, I fear. You sent for Smilash, and I have responded by practically annihilating him. In public, however, you must still bear with his antics. One moment more. I had forgotten to ask you whether you are interested in the shepherd whose wife you sheltered on the night of the storm?”
“He assured me, before he took his wife away, that he was comfortably settled in a lodging in Lyvern.”
“Yes. Very comfortably settled indeed. For half-a-crown a week he obtained permission to share a spacious drawingroom with two other families in a ten-roomed house in not much better repair than his blown-down hovel. This house yields to its landlord over two hundred a year, or rather