A Taste for Honey by H. F. Heard

leave.
    â€œWhy,” I broke in, “have you then kept me waiting about all day if it would have been quite safe for me to walk home?” I own there was irritation, natural irritation, in my voice.
    He showed no surprise or resentment at my rather rough interruption.
    â€œI saw you would not stay simply to hear my explanations,” he answered. “You have some of the impatience of a certain Proconsul Pontius who when in a famous, and, as it would seem, important interview, he found the discussion becoming abstract, terminated it with premature irritation, asking what is Truth and waiting not for an answer. So, as you chose to assume that I meant that you were in immediate danger of the bees and would not grasp that your danger really arose from your impatient unwillingness to understand the general character of the peril in which you stand, I permitted your misconception to serve your real interests and kept you here until you had had a fairly thorough demonstration of the factors impinging on your case.”
    He said this in such peculiarly exasperatingly quiet tones that I need hardly say that his explanation had the reverse effect from soothing my feelings, already on edge. The insult of coolly patronizing me by a lecture on my character was deliberately added to the injury of having used up my whole day. I held my tongue, however, though I felt quite uncomfortably hot. All this explains and shows how natural was my final and, I still think, inevitable protest. He paused. As I have said, I held my tongue with difficulty. And then he went on indifferently, as though there were nothing to apologize for, speaking slowly, as though he hadn’t already wasted enough of my time.
    â€œSince showing you that death’s-head moth, I think I ought to qualify what I have said. I know how impertinent advice from elders and strangers always seems, and, unfortunately, I am both, but may I request that you do not call on Heregrove without me? I should be very pleased to come with you. Indeed, that was the final point I was going to discuss with you, after which I was not going to detain you any longer.”
    How could I fail to resent that? I had been treated like a child that has to be tricked to serve its elders’ ends, and now, when I was highly and rightly vexed, as if the wasted time were not bad enough, this old dominie was going to force his company still further on the and, in fact, make an attempt to order my life. Who was this old stranger, pushing his advice on me and directing what I should do and whom I should see and in whose care? It was, of course, I felt, quite clear, that he had angled all the time to put me in a position in which I should be unable out of common politeness to refuse his request. He was a clever old crank of a busybody. I hate being managed and maneuvered. Even more, I dislike being made to change my ways and to do precisely the very thing which I live in the country just to avoid doing, taking strangers to call on one’s acquaintance. I felt so vexed at this transparent stratagem, coming on the top of everything else—the silly old man with his senile sense of his own tactful finesse, thinking I shouldn’t see through it (I was tired too, being kept waiting about all day)—that I felt a positive revulsion against him, and, I suppose by contrast, something almost like clannish protectiveness toward Heregrove.
    What was this stranger, gossiper, romancer doing? Making all kinds of insinuations about one of our village—a man about whom I only knew, as a matter of fact, that his honey was always good and quite reasonably priced, and who, poor fellow, had just had his wife killed by his bees which kept me in honey. True, he might not have been very fond of her, but English law had decided, and rightly, that she was the victim of a horrible accident. Even someone you dislike, you can miss very much and be very sorry for, especially if he is suddenly killed in