"Well. And what do you think of it?"
"I don't know. How's one to tell? But I say that the thing is done now
and there's an end of it," said the masculine creature as bluntly as his
innate solemnity permitted.
Mrs. Fyne moved a little in her chair. I turned to her and remarked
gently that this was a charge, a criticism, which was often made. Some
people always ask: What could he see in her? Others wonder what she
could have seen in him? Expressions of unsuitability.
She said with all the emphasis of her quietly folded arms: "I know perfectly well what Flora has seen in my brother."
I bowed my head to the gust but pursued my point.
"And then the marriage in most cases turns out no worse than the average,
to say the least of it."
Mrs. Fyne was disappointed by the optimistic turn of my sagacity. She
rested her eyes on my face as though in doubt whether I had enough
femininity in my composition to understand the case.
I waited for her to speak. She seemed to be asking herself; Is it after
all, worth while to talk to that man? You understand how provoking this
was. I looked in my mind for something appallingly stupid to say, with
the object of distressing and teasing Mrs. Fyne. It is humiliating to
confess a failure. One would think that a man of average intelligence
could command stupidity at will. But it isn't so. I suppose it's a
special gift or else the difficulty consists in being relevant.
Discovering that I could find no really telling stupidity, I turned to
the next best thing; a platitude. I advanced, in a common-sense tone,
that, surely, in the matter of marriage a man had only himself to please.
Mrs. Fyne received this without the flutter of an eyelid. Fyne's
masculine breast, as might have been expected, was pierced by that old,
regulation shaft. He grunted most feelingly. I turned to him with false
simplicity. "Don't you agree with me?"
"The very thing I've been telling my wife," he exclaimed in his extra-
manly bass. "We have been discussing--"
A discussion in the Fyne menage! How portentous! Perhaps the very first
difference they had ever had: Mrs. Fyne unflinching and ready for any
responsibility, Fyne solemn and shrinking--the children in bed upstairs;
and outside the dark fields, the shadowy contours of the land on the
starry background of the universe, with the crude light of the open
window like a beacon for the truant who would never come back now; a
truant no longer but a downright fugitive. Yet a fugitive carrying off
spoils. It was the flight of a raider--or a traitor? This affair of the
purloined brother, as I had named it to myself, had a very puzzling
physiognomy. The girl must have been desperate, I thought, hearing the
grave voice of Fyne well enough but catching the sense of his words not
at all, except the very last words which were: "Of course, it's extremely distressing."