A Reasonable Arrangement

"He's forty-one," said her mother, in the tone of someone laying down a losing card and expecting it to be argued with.

"I know how old he is."

"You've read too many novels to want a man forty-one years old. You cry at the ones where the young officer dies."

Geneviève folded the letter (Dixmer's letter, the second one, the one that named terms) and set it on the table between them. "I cried at that novel because the officer was an idiot who got himself shot for a woman who didn't love him. I don't intend to be either the officer or the woman."

Her mother waited.

"Camille married for love two years ago," Geneviève said. "You remember how it looked at the wedding. You've seen how it looks now — she flinches when he raises his voice at the servants, and he raises his voice at the servants constantly, and everyone at that wedding would have sworn on their lives it was a love match for the ages. Berthe married for sense, and no one cried at her wedding at all, and she and her husband still take supper together every night and actually seem glad of each other's company six years on. I've been watching both of those marriages very closely. I know which one I want."

Dixmer, when he called on her formally the following week, did not perform the kind of ardor Geneviève had watched other suitors perform for other girls. He simply told her, plainly, what he could offer: a settled business, a settled house, and, he added, glancing at the small stack of books on her writing desk with what looked like real rather than polite interest, no objection whatsoever to a wife who read more than her husband did.

"Most men would object to that."

"Most men are frightened of anything they can't fully account for. I've never seen the use in it." He said this without any particular flourish, the way another man might have remarked on the weather, and Geneviève found that she believed him considerably more than she'd believed any of the flourishes offered by younger, prettier suitors in the two seasons prior.

She married him within the month. She did not love him, not in the sense the novels meant by the word, and she told him as much before the wedding, watching carefully for the flinch she half expected. It didn't come.

"I didn't ask you to love me," Dixmer said. "I asked you to marry me. Those are different arrangements, and I've never understood why so many people insist on confusing them."

For the first several years, the arrangement held exactly the shape she'd calculated it would. He was attentive in his own unhurried way, gave her true say in matters most husbands reserved entirely to themselves, and neither raised his voice at the servants nor, so far as Geneviève ever discovered, gave her any cause to flinch at anything at all. She grew, without quite planning to, fond of him — not the novel's kind of love, but something steadier, built from years of a man consistently doing what he'd said he would do.

It was the tannery talk that changed first, so gradually she couldn't afterward name the evening it had started. Dixmer began coming home with opinions about the Convention that grew sharper by the month, and Geneviève, who had married a reasonable man and had no reason yet to doubt he remained one, found his early arguments persuasive enough on their own individual merits.

"You're very quiet about all this," he said one evening, watching her over supper.

"I'm listening. I'm deciding whether I agree with you."

"And?"

"Ask me again in a year," Geneviève said, and meant it as a joke. She would think of that evening often, later, once a year had in fact passed and the man across the supper table had hardened into someone she was no longer entirely certain she'd been asked to agree with at all, only to obey.