She was
forty-five, and it said a good deal for her ample but proper graces that
at forty-five she had numerous admirers. The girl was English in
appearance, with a touch perhaps of Spanish--why, who can say? Was it
because of those Spanish hidalgoes wrecked on the Irish coast long since?
Her mind and her tongue, however, were Irish like her father's. You would
have liked her, everybody did,--yet you would have thought that nature
had failed in self-confidence for once, she was so pointedly designed to
express the ancient dame's colour-scheme, even to the delicate auriferous
down on her youthful cheek and the purse-proud look of her faintly
retrousse nose; though in fact she never had had a purse and scarcely
needed one. In any case she had an ample pocket in her dress.
This fairly full description of her is given not because she is the most
important person in the story, but because the end of the story would
have been entirely different had it not been for her; and because she
herself was one of those who are so much the sport of circumstances or
chance that they express the full meaning of the title of this story. As
a line beneath the title explains, the tale concerns a matrimonial
deserter. Certainly this girl had never deserted matrimony, though she
had on more than one occasion avoided it; and there had been men mean and
low enough to imagine they might allure her to the conditions of
matrimony without its status.
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