There was the baby. You couldn't,
Rose said, play fast and loose with _him_. Rose, at her own request, had
come to take care of the baby for a month, and she was not going back on
that, not if it was ever so. Then there were all the things that her
mistress, Rose said, was going to learn her. So many things, things she
was not to do, things she was not to say, things she was on no account
to wear. Rose, buying her trousseau, was not to be trusted alone for a
minute.

It had been put to Rose, very gently by her mistress, very gravely by
her master, whether she would really be happy if she married this
eccentric young gentleman with the band-box. Was it not possible that
she might be happier with somebody rather less eccentric? And Rose
replied that she knew her own mind; that she couldn't be happy at all
with anybody else, and that, if she could, she'd rather be unhappy with
Mr. Tanqueray, eccentricity, band-box and all. Whereas, if he was to be
unhappy with _her_, now----But, when it came to that, they hadn't the
heart to tell her that he might, and very probably would be.

If Rose knew her own mind, Tanqueray knew his. The possibility of being
unhappy with Rose (he had considered it) was dim compared with the
certainty that he was unhappy without her. To be deprived of the sight
and sound of her for six days in the week, to go down to Fleet, like the
butcher, on a Sunday, and find her rosy and bright-eyed with affection,
with a little passion that grew like his own with delay, that grew in
silence and in secret, making Rose, every Sunday, more admirably shy;
to be with her for two hours, and then to be torn from her by a train he
had to catch; all this kept Tanqueray in an excitement incompatible with
discreet reflection.

Rose would not name a day before the fourteenth of July, not if it was
ever so. He adored that little phrase of desperate negation. He was in a
state of mind to accept everything that Rose did and said as adorable.
Rose had strange audacities, strange embarrassments. Dumbness would come
upon Rose in moments which another woman, Jane for instance, would have
winged with happy words. She had a look that was anything but dumb, a
look of innocent tenderness, which in another woman, Jane again, would
not have been allowed to rest upon him so long. He loved that look. In
her very lapses, her gentle elision of the aitch, he found a foreign, an
infantile, a pathetic charm.

So the date of the wedding wa