The Woman in the Bazaar

								

not wholly unaware that he found favour, generally, with females of his
class, the very austereness of his nature provoked and attracted them;
but illicit love repelled him, and, so far, since he had been in a
position to support a wife, no girl or woman in particular had caught
his fancy, though in the abstract he was not averse to the notion of
marriage.
His ideal of womanhood was modelled on the type represented by his
mother and his aunts and his spinster sister, ladies whose sole charm
lay in their personal virtue, the keynote of whose lives was duty and
devotion to the home. Coventry was an only son, and on the death of his
father his mother's whole existence became centred on himself, while
Miss Coventry sacrificed youth and pleasure and all outside interests in
order that she might minister undividedly to her bereaved parent; and
both women remained serenely unconscious of the waste of life and energy
and happiness that the sacrifice entailed. The daughter refused a
proposal from a worthy gentleman because, she said, she could not leave
Mama; and her mother and her brother accepted this decision as only
right and proper. The suitor failing to suggest that Mama should also
become an inmate of his house, the matter went no further. Such
immolation of female youth to age is common and unending, and in the
majority of cases the victim lays down her natural rights on the altar
of duty with but little conception of the magnitude of the offering, and
receives small credit for her martyrdom.
There had been something chaste and exquisite about this maiden in the
garden that had touched a tender chord in George Coventry's breast. He
felt an inward certainty that the girl was gentle, simple, sweet--a
little saint, with her aureole of hair, and her artless singing of the
old familiar hymn. The impression lured him so irresistibly that he was
several times on the point of turning his horse's head, but each excuse
that presented itself struck him as too thin. He had lost his way--where
to? He had been suddenly taken ill, felt faint; the very idea caused him
to smile--he had never felt faint in his life and did not know how to
enact the symptoms, and no one would for a moment believe him to be ill,
judging by his appearance of hopelessly robust health! Perhaps a
cigarette would stimulate his imagination; he put his hand in his pocket
and encountered a knife given him only yesterday by his sister for his
birthday--the kind of gift "for a man" above which certain feminine
minds seem unable to rise when cigarette-cases, sleeve-links, tie-pins
and pocket-books have been exhausted. The knife was a cumbersome plated
article, comprising, in addition to blades of all sizes, a corkscrew,
folding scissors, a button-hook, and an instrument intended for the
extraction of stones from horses' hoofs. For once he blessed Nellie's
limited notions of masculine needs, because her present suggested a
plausible plea.