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Benyon’s ignorance of her pretexts is a proof that this rather oddly-mated couple never arrived at perfect intimacy,–in spite of a fact which remains to be related. He thought of this afterwards, and thought how strange it was that he had not felt more at liberty to ask her what she did for him, and how she did it, and how much she suffered for him. She would probably not have admitted that she suffered at all, and she had no wish to pose for a martyr. Benyon remembered this, as I say, in the after years, when he tried to explain to himself certain things which simply puzzled him; it came back to him with the vision, already faded, of shabby cross-streets, straggling toward rivers, with red sunsets, seen through a haze of dust, at the end; a vista through which the figures of a young man and a girl slowly receded and disappeared,–strolling side by side, with the relaxed pace of desultory talk, but more closely linked as they passed into the distance, linked by its at last appearing safe to them–in the Tenth Avenue–that the young lady should take his arm. They were always approaching that inferior thoroughfare; but he could scarcely have told you, in those days, what else they were approaching. He had nothing in the world but his pay, and he felt that this was rather a “mean” income to offer Miss Gressie. Therefore he did n’t put it forward; what he offered, instead, was the expression–crude often, and almost boyishly extravagant–of a delighted admiration of her beauty, the tenderest tones of his voice, the softest assurances of his eye and the most insinuating pressure of her hand at those moments when she consented to place it in his arm. All this was an eloquence which, if necessary, might have been condensed into a single sentence; but those few words were scarcely needful, when it was as plain that he expected–in general–she would marry him, as it was indefinite that he counted upon her for living on a few hundreds a year. If she had been a different girl he might have asked her to wait,–might have talked to her of the coming of better days, of his prospective promotion, of its being wiser, perhaps, that he should leave the navy and look about for a more lucrative career. With Georgina it was difficult to go into such questions; she had no taste whatever for detail. She was delightful as a woman to love, because when a young man is in love he discovers that; but she could not be called helpful, for she never suggested anything. That is, she never had done so till the day she really proposed–for that was the form it took–to become his wife without more delay. “Oh, yes, I will marry you;” these words, which I quoted a little way back, were not so much the answer to something he had said at the moment, as the light conclusion of a report she had just made, for the first time, of her actual situation in her father’s house.

“I am afraid I shall have to see less of you,” she had begun by saying. “They watch me so much.”

“It is very little already,” he answered. “What is once or twice a week?”

“That’s easy for you to say. You are your own master, but you don’t know what I go through.”

“Do they make it very bad for you, dearest? Do they make scenes?” Benyon asked.

“No, of course not. Don’t you know us enough to know how we behave? No scenes,–that would be a relief. However, I never make them myself, and I never will–that’s one comfort for you, for the future, if you want to know. Father and mother keep very quiet, looking at me as if I were one of the lost, with hard, screwing eyes, like gimlets. To me they scarcely say anything, but they talk it all over with each other, and try and decide what is to be done. It’s my belief that father has written to the people in Washington–what do you call it! the Department–to have you moved away from Brooklyn,–to have you sent to sea.”