He shook his head at me triumphantly.
“Well, my dear boy,” he said, “I shall be counting the days now.”
I understood what he meant. I knew that those young people had settled already on a runaway match without official preliminaries. This was really a logical decision, Old Nelson (or Nielsen) would never have agreed to give up Freya peaceably to this compromising Jasper. Heavens! What would the Dutch authorities say to such a match! It sounds too ridiculous for words. But there’s nothing in the world more selfishly hard than a timorous man in a fright about his “little estate,” as old Nelson used to call it in apologetic accents, A heart permeated by a particular sort of funk is proof against sense, feeling, and ridicule. It’s a flint.
Jasper would have made his request all the same and then taken his own way; but it was Freya who decided that nothing should be said, on the ground that, “Papa would only worry himself to distraction.” He was capable of making himself ill, and then she wouldn’t have the heart to leave him. Here you have the sanity of feminine outlook and the frankness of feminine reasoning. And for the rest, Miss Freya could read “poor dear papa” in the way a woman reads a man—like an open book. His daughter once gone, old Nelson would not worry himself. He would raise a great outcry, and make no end of lamentable fuss, but that’s not the same thing. The real agonies of indecision, the anguish of conflicting feelings would be spared to him, And as he was too unassuming to rage, he would, after a period of lamentation, devote
