The Woman Thou Gavest Me

sea-gulls were swirling and
jabbering above the rocks in the harbour below the house before I lay
down to sleep.

I was awakened by a hurried knocking at my door, and by an impatient
voice crying:

"Mary! Mary! Get up! Let me in!"

It was Aunt Bridget who had arrived in my husband's automobile. When I
opened the door to her she came sailing into the room with her new
half-moon bonnet a little awry, as if she had put it on hurriedly in the
dim light of early morning, and, looking at me with her cold grey eyes
behind their gold-rimmed spectacles, she began to bombard me with
mingled ridicule and indignant protest.

"Goodness me, girl, what's all this fuss about? You little simpleton,
tell me what has happened!"

She was laughing. I had hardly ever heard Aunt Bridget laugh before. But
her vexation soon got the better of her merriment.

"His lordship's letter arrived in the middle of the night and nearly
frightened us out of our senses. Your father was for coming away
straight, and it would have been worse for you if he had. But I said:
'No, this is work for a woman, I'll go,' and here I am. And now tell me,
what in the name of goodness does this ridiculous trouble mean?"

It was hard to say anything on such a subject under such circumstances,
especially when so challenged, but Aunt Bridget, without waiting for my
reply, proceeded to indicate the substance of my husband's letter.

From this I gathered that he had chosen (probably to save his pride) to
set down my resistance to ignorance of the first conditions of
matrimony, and had charged my father first and Aunt Bridget afterwards
with doing him a shocking injustice in permitting me to be married to
him without telling me what every girl who becomes a wife ought to know.

"But, good gracious," said my Aunt Bridget, "who would have imagined you
_didn't_ know. I thought every girl in the world knew before she put up
her hair and came out of short frocks. My Betsy did, I'm sure of that.
And to think that you--you whom we though

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