Page:The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman.djvu/172

 he were young enough to horse-whip the fellow; I said I agreed. He wished the girl had a brother to do it; I said again that I agreed.” I really thought it best to let him wear himself out. . . When a man speaks in that tone about his own son, when a Christian minister talks about horse-whipping people. . . All these wild words made rather less than no impression on me, as I was quite sure that my boy hadn’t written anything that could be used against him. “And what is the outcome of it all?,” I ventured to ask, when the storm had abated. “The outcome?” When Arthur is moved, he has a most irritating trick of repeating one’s words. For thirty years I have tried to break him of it, but he is obdurate. “You’d better find some woman who’ll marry the young scamp and keep him in order. The sooner the better. And I wish her joy of him.”

When Will returned to Mount Street—he lived at his club until the wild clergyman returned to Morecambe—, I begged for enlightenment, but he would say nothing. For that, I am not ashamed to confess, I respected him; however badly this Molly Phenton (or “Molly Wanton,” as I prefer to call her) had behaved, Will was too chivalrous to clear himself at the expense of a woman—and this though I could see that he was worried out of his mind.