There followed an extremely harassing time for Colonel and Mrs Powys.
Mrs Ashburnham had written to say that, quite sincerely, nothing would give greater ease to her maternal anxieties than to have her son marry one of Mrs Powys' daughters if only he showed some inclination to do so.
For, she added, nothing but a love-match was to be thought of in her Edward's case.
But the poor Powys couple had to run things so very fine that even the bringing together of the young people was a desperate hazard.
The mere expenditure upon sending one of the girls over from Ireland to Branshaw was terrifying to them; and whichever girl they selected might not be the one to ring Edward's bell.
On the other hand, the expenditure upon mere food and extra sheets for a visit from the Ashburnhams to them was terrifying, too.
It would mean, mathematically, going short in so many meals themselves, afterwards.
Nevertheless, they chanced it, and all the three Ashburnhams came on a visit to the lonely manor-house.
They could give Edward some rough shooting, some rough fishing and a whirl of femininity; but I should say the girls made really more impression upon Mrs Ashburnham than upon Edward himself.
They appeared to her to be so clean run and so safe.
They were indeed so clean run that, in a faint sort of way, Edward seems to have regarded them rather as boys than as girls.
And then, one evening, Mrs Ashburnham had with her boy one of those conversations that English mothers have with English sons.
It seems to have been a criminal sort of proceeding, though I don't know what took place at it.
Anyhow, next morning Colonel Ashburnham asked on behalf of his son for the hand of Leonora.
This caused some consternation to the Powys couple, since Leonora was the third daughter and Edward ought to have married the eldest.
Mrs Powys, with her rigid sense of the proprieties, almost wished to reject the proposal.
But the Colonel, her husband, pointed out that the visit would have cost them sixty pounds, what with the hire of an extra servant, of a horse and car, and with the purchase of beds and bedding and extra tablecloths.
There was nothing else for it but the marriage.
In that way Edward and Leonora became man and wife.
I don't know that a very minute study of their progress towards complete disunion is necessary.
Perhaps it is.
But there are many things that I cannot well make out, about which I cannot well question Leonora, or about which Edward did not tell me.
I do not know that there was ever any question of love from Edward to her.
He regarded her, certainly, as desirable amongst her sisters.
He was obstinate to the extent of saying that if he could not have her he would not have any of them.
And, no doubt, before the marriage, he made her pretty speeches out of books that he had read.
But, as far as he could describe his feelings at all, later, it seems that, calmly and without any quickening of the pulse, he just carried the girl off, there being no opposition.
It had, however, been all so long ago that it seemed to him, at the end of his poor life, a dim and misty affair.
He had the greatest admiration for Leonora.
He had the very greatest admiration.
He admired her for her truthfulness, for her cleanness of mind, and the clean-run-ness of her limbs, for her efficiency, for the fairness of her skin, for the gold of her hair, for her religion, for her sense of duty.
It was a satisfaction to take her about with him.
But she had not for him a touch of magnetism.
I suppose, really, he did not love her because she was never mournful; what really made him feel good in life was to comfort somebody who would be darkly and mysteriously mournful.
That he had never had to do for Leonora.
Perhaps, also, she was at first too obedient.
I do not mean to say that she was submissive—that she deferred, in her judgements, to his.
She did not.
But she had been handed over to him, like some patient medieval virgin; she had been taught all her life that the first duty of a woman is to obey.
And there she was.
In her, at least, admiration for his qualities very soon became love of the deepest description.
If his pulses never quickened she, so I have been told, became what is called an altered being when he approached her from the other side of a dancing-floor.
Her eyes followed him about full of trustfulness, of admiration, of gratitude, and of love.
He was also, in a great sense, her pastor and guide—and he guided her into what, for a girl straight out of a convent, was almost heaven.
I have not the least idea of what an English officer's wife's existence may be like.
At any rate, there were feasts, and chatterings, and nice men who gave her the right sort of admiration, and nice women who treated her as if she had been a baby.
And her confessor approved of her life, and Edward let her give little treats to the girls of the convent she had left, and the Reverend Mother approved of him. There could not have been a happier girl for five or six years.
For it was only at the end of that time that clouds began, as the saying is, to arise.
She was then about twenty-three, and her purposeful efficiency made her perhaps have a desire for mastery.
She began to perceive that Edward was extravagant in his largesses.