“That is a matter which depends solely on yourself. You possess many estimable qualities, Major North, but you were born a few centuries too late. Of course I don’t mean that you were to blame for the fact--on the contrary, it is distinctly a misfortune, both to yourself and others. You would have made an ideal husband in the days when it was considered quite the proper thing for a gentleman to correct his wife with a stick not thicker than his middle finger.” “Really, Lady Haigh, this is beyond a joke!” Dick was angry now--there was no mistaking the fact. “Quite so; but I am not joking. I don’t mean that if you married Georgia, you would keep her in order with a horsewhip--I don’t for a moment believe she would let you, for one thing. But I think you would certainly need some resource of the kind to fall back upon if your ideal of domestic discipline was to be maintained. In your house, according to your theory, there would be one law and one will, and that law would be your law, and that will your will. That is a beautiful ideal--for you--and it would no doubt produce, in course of time, a saintly submissiveness of character in your wife. But any woman who is to be subjected to such a course of training ought to be warned beforehand, and agree to accept it with her eyes open. And that Georgia would never do.” “I don’t know why she shouldn’t. All women do.” “Do they?” asked Lady Haigh, with as little sarcasm in her tone as the subject admitted--and Dick was silent, recognising that he had, to use his own phrase, given himself away. His counsellor went on, “I am going to ask you a personal question, Major North. Why do you want to marry Miss Keeling?” “Because I love her, and I can’t do without her,” very gruffly. “But why didn’t you fall in love with that beautiful Miss Hervey, whom we met at Mrs Egerton’s before we came out here?” “Because she is not my sort--an empty-headed doll!”