“Come, that’s dreadfully ungallant. But perhaps I understand the frame of mind a little, so go on. Your sweetheart—”
“She is rather higher in the world than I am.”
“As it should be.”
“And her father won’t hear of it, as I now stand.”
“Not an uncommon case.”
“And now comes what I want your advice upon. Something has happened at her house which makes it out of the question for us to ask her father again now. So we are keeping silent. In the meantime an architect in India has just written to Mr. Hewby to ask whether he can find for him a young assistant willing to go over to Bombay to prepare drawings for work formerly done by the engineers. The salary he offers is 350 rupees a month, or about £35. Hewby has mentioned it to me, and I have been to Dr. Wray, who says I shall acclimatise without much illness. Now, would you go?”
“You mean to say, because it is a possible road to the young lady.”
“Yes; I was thinking I could go over and make a little money, and then come back and ask for her. I have the option of practising for myself after a year.”
“Would she be staunch?”
“Oh yes! Forever—to the end of her life!”
“How do you know?”
“Why, how do people know? Of course, she will.”
Knight leant back in his chair. “Now, though I know her thoroughly as she exists in your heart, Stephen, I don’t know her in the flesh. All I want to ask is, is this idea of going to India based entirely upon a belief in her fidelity?”
“Yes; I should not go if it were not for her.”
“Well, Stephen, you have put me in rather an awkward position. If I give my true sentiments, I shall hurt your feelings; if I don’t, I shall hurt my own judgment. And remember, I don’t know much about women.”
“But you have had attachments, although you tell me very little about them.”
“And I only hope you’ll continue to prosper till I tell you more.”
Stephen winced at this rap. “I have never formed a deep attachment,” continued Knight. “I never have found a woman worth it. Nor have I been once engaged to be married.”
“You write as if you had been engaged a hundred times, if I may be allowed to say so,” said Stephen in an injured tone.
“Yes, that may be. But, my dear Stephen, it is only those who half know a thing that write about it. Those who know it thoroughly don’t take the trouble. All I know about women, or men either, is a mass of generalities. I plod along, and occasionally lift my eyes and skim the weltering surface of mankind lying between me and the horizon, as a crow might; no more.”
Knight stopped as if he had fallen into a train of thought, and Stephen looked with affectionate awe at a master whose mind, he believed, could swallow up at one meal all that his own head contained.
There was affective sympathy, but no great intellectual fellowship, between Knight and Stephen Smith. Knight had seen his young friend when the latter was a cherry-cheeked happy boy, had been interested in him, had kept his eye upon him, and generously helped the lad to books, till the mere connection of patronage grew to acquaintance, and that ripened to friendship. And so, though Smith was not at all the man Knight would have deliberately chosen as a friend—or even for one of a group of a dozen friends—he somehow was his friend. Circumstance, as usual, did it all. How many of us can say of our most intimate alter ego, leaving alone friends of the outer circle, that he is the man we should have chosen, as embodying the net result after adding up all the points in human nature that we love, and principles we hold, and subtracting all that we hate? The man is really somebody we got to know by mere physical juxtaposition long maintained, and was taken into our confidence, and even heart, as a makeshift.
“And what do you think of her?” Stephen ventured to say, after a silence.
“Taking her merits on trust from you,” said Knight, “as we do those of the Roman poets of whom we know nothing but that they lived, I still think she will not stick to you through, say, three years of absence in India.”
“But she will!” cried Stephen desperately. “She is a girl all delicacy and honour. And no woman of that kind, who has committed herself so into a man’s hands as she has into mine, could possibly marry another.”
“How has she committed herself?” asked Knight curiously.
Stephen did not answer. Knight had looked on his love so sceptically that it would not do to say all that he had intended to say by any means.
“Well, don’t tell,” said Knight. “But you are begging the question, which is, I suppose, inevitable in love.”
“And I’ll tell you another thing,” the younger man pleaded. “You remember what you said to me once about women receiving a kiss. Don’t you? Why, that instead of our being charmed by the fascination of their bearing at such a time, we should immediately doubt them if their confusion has any grace in it—that awkward bungling was the true charm of the occasion, implying that we are the first who has played such a part with them.”
“It is true, quite,” said Knight musingly.
It often happened that the disciple thus remembered the lessons of the master long after the master himself had forgotten them.
“Well, that was like her!” cried Stephen triumphantly. “She was in such a flurry that she didn’t know what she was doing.”
“Splendid, splendid!” said Knight soothingly. “So that all I have to say is, that if you see a good opening in Bombay there’s no reason why you should not go without troubling to draw fine distinctions as to reasons. No man fully realizes what opinions he acts upon, or what his actions mean.”
“Yes; I go to Bombay.
