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."

"I guess that won't do much good. They want me in Brooklyn, they don't
want me at sea."

"Well, they are capable of going to Europe for a year, on purpose to
take me," Geoigina said.

"How can they take you, if you won't go? And if you should go, what good
would it do, if you were only to find me here when you came back, just
the same as you left me?"

"Oh, well!" said Georgina, with her lovely smile, "of course they think
that absence would cure me of--cure me of--" And she paused, with a
certain natural modesty, not saying exactly of what.

"Cure you of what, darling? Say it, please say it," the young man
murmured, drawing her hand surreptitiously into his arm.

"Of my absurd infatuation!"

"And would it, dearest?"

"Yes, very likely. But I don't mean to try. I sha'n't go to Europe,--not
when I don't want to. But it's better I should see less of you,--even
that I sho