"He didn't. I don't believe he had a big enough one to break. Oh, yes, I've always detested your great man, the General. They were engaged to be married, you have heard, I suppose, and three weeks before the wedding she found out some dreadful things about his life--and she behaved then, as Dr. Theophilus used to say, 'like a gentleman of honour.' He--he ought to have married another woman, but even after Aunt Matoaca gave him up, he refused to do it--and this was what she never got over. If he had behaved as dishonourably as that in business, no man would have spoken to him, she said--and can you believe it?--she declined to speak to him for twenty years, though she was desperately in love with him all the time. She only began again when he got old and gouty and humbled himself to her. In my heart of hearts I can't help disliking him in spite of all his success, but I really believe that he has never in his life cared for any woman except Aunt Matoaca. It's because she's so perfectly honourable, I think--but, of course, it is her terrible experience that has made her so--so extreme in her views." "What are her views?" "She calls them principles--but Aunt Mitty says, and I suppose she's right, that it would have been more ladylike to have borne her wrongs in silence instead of shrieking them aloud. For my part I think that, however loud she shrieked, she couldn't shriek as loud as the General has acted." "I hope she isn't still in love with him?" Her clear rippling laugh--the laugh of a free spirit--fluted over the broomsedge. "Can you imagine it? One might quite as well be in love with one's Thanksgiving turkey. No, she isn't in love with him now, but she's in love with the idea that she used to be, and that's almost as bad. I know it's her own past that makes her think all the time about the wrongs of women. She wants to have them vote, and make the laws, and have a voice in the government. Do you?" "I never thought about it, but I'm pretty sure I shouldn't like my wife to go to the polls," I answered. Again she laughed. "It's funny, isn't it?--that when you ask a man anything about women, he always begins to talk about his wife, even when he hasn't got one?" "That's because he's always hoping to have one, I suppose." "Do you want one very badly?" she taunted. "Dreadfully--the one I want." "A real dream lady in pink tarlatan?" "No, a living lady in a riding habit." If I had thought to embarrass her by this flight of gallantry, my hope was fruitless, for the arrow, splintered by her smile, fell harmlessly to the dust of the road. "An Amazon seems hardly the appropriate mate to Sir Charles Grandison," she retorted. "Just now it was the General that I resembled." "Oh, you out-generaled the General a mile back. Even he didn't attempt to break the heart of Aunt Matoaca at their second meeting."