Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman
all. . . I did not ask Will, because I could not bear him to tell me an untruth; and the code ordains that a man must never admit such a thing, always the woman must be shielded. One did not need to be his mother in order to see that he was worried. Remorse. . . The sense that nothing could ever again be the same. . . Hatred of himself. . . Hatred of her. . . And, all the while, I had to sit with my hands in my lap, seeing his health and happiness ruined. He could not eat, he could not sleep; Sir Appleton kept writing and telephoning to ask when Will was coming to see him, but there was no question of trying to find fresh work. . . And at any moment this wild man of the woods might descend upon us again.
The first time he came—I, if you please, was not allowed in the room—, Arthur would only stamp up and down, saying that Will—our boy—was a scamp and deserved horse-whipping. I begged for enlightenment, but at this period the wild man only claimed that Will had compromised his Molly and that there had been a promise of marriage. . . Exactly what one would have expected! Precisely what the girl was working for! That was the moment to strike and to strike hard. “A promise of marriage? Prove it!” I well knew that Will was too instinctively wise to write her letters
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