Believe me, the woman he
condescends upon must, in return for that happy privilege, surrender
her whole fate into his hands. Beneath his deference to our sex he
carries an imperious will, and would demand no less."
"There _is_ a little bit of that about him, now you mention it,"
assented the Doctor.
"But let us not cheat--" Miss Marty checked herself suddenly.
"Let us not vex ourselves with any such apprehensions. He will never
marry, I am convinced. I cannot imagine him in the light of a
parent--with offspring, for instance. Rather, when I see him in his
regimentals, or, again, in his mayoral robe and chain--you have
noticed how they become him?--"
The Doctor admitted, with a faint sigh, that he had.
"Well, then, he puts me in mind of that--what d'you call it, which
the poets tell us is reproduced but once in several hundred years?"
"The blossoming aloe?" suggested the Doctor.
Miss Marty shook her head. "It's not a plant--it's a kind of bird.
It begins with 'P, h,'--and you think of Dublin."
"Let me see--Phelim? No, I have it! Phoenix."
"That's it--Phoenix. And when it's going to die it lights a fire and
sits down upon it and another springs up from the ashes."
"But I don't see how that applies to the Major."
"No-o?" queried Miss Marty, dubiously. "Well, not in every
particular; but the point is, there's only one at a time."
"The same might be said," urged the Doctor, delicately, "of other
individual members of the Town Council; with qualifications, of
course.
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