Sink or Swim? , Volume II

"I had not the slightest intention of coming back -- God knows I had not -- when I went away; but I am the weakest fool. I told myself again and again that I was mad, and worse, to come where -- where you are, Honor; " and he drew a long breath as the word came hesitatingly from his lips; "but it would not do. The more I tried to forget, the more I remembered; and the oftener I told myself that I _must_ not see you, the more some evil thing within me urged me on to come."

Honor had listened to him hitherto in silence; partly through surprise, and partly too because of that pitiable shrinking which so many women, especially young women, experience when it becomes their duty to hurt the feelings of men who venture to address them in language that ought to be forbidden. If we could look with any degree of perspicacity into the intricacies of female motives, I think it would be found that there is no inconsiderable amount of selfishness in this fear of wounding the susceptibilities of a too daring admirer. The chances that the hero of a hundred such fights, when wounded and worsted in the last encounter, will betake himself to fresh fields and pastures new, is not altogether an agreeable one. The sternly virtuous female, left alone with the sole reward -- not always a sufficing one -- of an approving conscience, is (and she looks forward to this dismal _fait accompli_ with no reassuring glance) not precisely in a cheerful position. It is never pleasant to be forsaken -- never consoling to be abandoned to the society of a dull, unappreciating husband, or, greater evil still, to the company of a woman's own thoughts, the more especially when that woman has allowed herself to listen to the voice of the charmer, and has grown accustomed to the flattering attentions of an ever awake and devoted _soupirant_. So the foolish wife -- a well-intentioned one, possibly, in spite of vanity and its consequent shortcomings -- temporises, deliberates, puts off till a more convenient season the vindication of her matronly dignity, unconscious meanwhile that her feet are on the brink of a precipice, and that the avenger of guilty thoughts is treading swift behind her.