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Updated: July 22, 2025
"Captain Boyson!" she cried, her composure giving way, "this is intolerable, outrageous! It is humiliating that you should even expect me to argue with you. Yet," she bit her lip, angry with the agitation that would assail her, "for the sake of our friendship to which you appeal, I would rather not be angry. What you say is monstrous!" her voice shook.
"No," said Barnes, after thinking a moment. "I remember somebody pointed her out at the opera." His companion looked at him with a kind of hard amusement. Cecilia Boyson was only five-and-twenty, but there was already something in her that foretold the formidable old maid. "Well, when people begin upon Daphne Floyd," she said, "they generally go through with it. Ah! here comes Alfred."
They had given a handle to such harsh critics as Alfred Boyson. But she meant somehow to put herself right; and not only herself, but the great cause of woman's freedom and independence. No woman, in the better future that is coming, shall be forced either by law or opinion to continue the relations of marriage with a man she has come to despise.
"I wished to ask you a question, in the name of our old friendship; and because I have also become a friend as you know of your husband." He felt, rather than saw, the start of anger in the woman beside him. "Captain Boyson! I cannot defend myself, but I would ask you to recognize ordinary courtesies. I have now no husband." "Of your husband," he repeated, without hesitation, yet gently.
Captain Boyson, pushing his way through the throng, announced to his sister and General Hobson that he had found the curator in charge of the house, who sent a message by him to the effect that if only the party would wait till four o'clock, the official closing hour, he himself would have great pleasure in showing them the house when all the tourists of the day had taken their departure.
Sometimes he turned his back upon her almost; and Cecilia Boyson held him. But, if there was too much of the "eternal womanly" in Miss Floyd, there was not enough in Cecilia Boyson. He began to discover also that she was too clever for him, and was in fact talking down to him. Some of the things that she said to him about New York and Washington puzzled him extremely.
The General did not mean to give himself away; he intended, indeed, precisely the contrary; but, after every round of conversation Miss Boyson felt herself more and more richly provided with materials for satire at the expense of England and the English tourist, his invincible conceit, insularity, and condescension. She was a clever though tiresome woman; and expressed herself best in letters.
She was, he supposed, intellectual; but the intellectual women in England did not talk in the same way. He was equal to them, or flattered himself that he was; but Miss Boyson was beyond him. He was getting into great difficulties with her, when suddenly Miss Floyd addressed him: "I am sure I saw you in New York, at the opera?" She bent over to him as she spoke, and lowered her voice.
She supposed that Alfred Boyson would hardly cut her; but she was tolerably certain that he would not wish his young wife to become acquainted with her. She scorned his disapproval of her; but she smarted under it.
Roger raised his head it might have been thought, angrily. "Who on earth ?" "Captain Boyson?" The young man's face changed. "I don't mind him," he said sombrely. "He's an awfully good sort. He was in Philadelphia a few months ago, when I was. He knows all about me. It was he and his sister who introduced me to my wife."
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