A Damsel in Distress

He had now time for meditation. There are few situations which

provide more scope for meditation than that of the man penned up on

a small balcony a considerable distance from the ground, with his

only avenue of retreat cut off behind him. So George meditated.

First, he mused on Plummer. He thought some hard thoughts about

Plummer. Then he brooded on the unkindness of a fortune which had

granted him the opportunity of this meeting with Maud, only to

snatch it away almost before it had begun. He wondered how long the

late Lord Leonard had been permitted to talk on that occasion

before he, too, had had to retire through these same windows. There

was no doubt about one thing. Lovers who chose that room for their

interviews seemed to have very little luck.

It had not occurred to George at first that there could be any

further disadvantage attached to his position other than the

obvious drawbacks which had already come to his notice. He was now

to perceive that he had been mistaken. A voice was speaking in the

room he had left, a plainly audible voice, deep and throaty; and

within a minute George had become aware that he was to suffer the

additional discomfort of being obliged to listen to a fellow

man--one could call Plummer that by stretching the facts a

little--proposing marriage. The gruesomeness of the situation became

intensified. Of all moments when a man--and justice compelled George

to admit that Plummer was technically human--of all moments when a

man may by all the laws of decency demand to be alone without an

audience of his own sex, the chiefest is the moment when he is

asking a girl to marry him. George's was a sensitive nature, and he

writhed at the thought of playing the eavesdropper at such a time.

He looked frantically about him for a means of escape. Plummer had

now reached the stage of saying at great length that he was not

worthy of Maud. He said it over and over, again in different ways.

George was in hearty agreement with him, but he did not want to

hear it. He wanted to get away. But how? Lord Leonard on a similar

occasion had leaped. Some might argue therefore on the principle

that what man has done, man can do, that George should have

imitated him. But men differ. There was a man attached to a circus

who used to dive off the roof of Madison Square Garden on to a

sloping board, strike it with his chest, turn a couple of

somersaults, reach the ground, bow six times and go off to lunch.

That sort of thing is a gift. Some of us have it, some have not.

George had not. Painful as it was to hear Plummer floundering

through his proposal of marriage, instinct told him that it would

be far more painful to hurl himself out into mid-air on the

sporting chance of having his downward progress arrested by the

branches of the big tree that had upheld Lord Leonard. No, there

seemed nothing for it but to remain where he was.