Georginas Reasons | Page 4

in the squares, or in the topmost streets, or in the sidemost
avenues, on the afternoons of spring. It was especially during this phase
of their relations that Georgina struck Benyon as imperial Her whole
person seemed to exhale a tranquil, happy consciousness of having
broken a law. She never told him how she arranged the matter at home,
how she found it possible always to keep the appointments (to meet
him out of the house) that she so boldly made, in what degree she
dissimulated to her parents, and how much, in regard to their continued
acquaintance, the old people suspected and accepted. If Mr. and Mrs.
Gressie had forbidden him the house, it was not, apparently, because
they wished her to walk with him in the Tenth Avenue or to sit at his
side under the blossoming lilacs in Stuyvesant Square. He didn't
believe that she told lies in Twelfth Street; he thought she was too
imperial to lie; and he wondered what she said to her mother when, at
the end of nearly a whole afternoon of vague peregrination with her
lover, this bridling, bristling matron asked her where she had been.
Georgina was capable of simply telling the truth; and yet if she simply
told the truth, it was a wonder that she had not been simply packed off
to Europe.
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