“It is the second blow … which makes the fray”

“It is the second blow … which makes the fray” is the narrator’s maxim for understanding the belated course of Uncle Toby’s amours with Mrs. Wadman. By treating the later advance as the decisive one, the phrase turns a long interruption into part of the courtship’s meaning: after almost eleven years, a renewed action can make the quarrel, or amorous contest, begin.

The maxim in context

Uncle Toby’s attention had been occupied by other matters. He did not return to the courtship until the demolition of Dunkirk, when, as the narrator puts it, Europe’s other civilities had been settled. The allusion places the resumption after a broad interval of military and diplomatic business, making the delay in Toby’s private affairs part of the contrast between public events and personal desire.

The resulting armistice lasted almost eleven years. The narrator describes this period as an armistice from Toby’s point of view, but a vacancy from Mrs. Wadman’s: the same interval therefore has a different significance for each participant. The phrase about the second blow supplies the reason for naming the affair after Toby’s amours with Mrs. Wadman rather than Mrs. Wadman’s with Toby. The renewed initiative, however belated, is treated as the action that makes the fray.

Meaning and narrative use

The maxim recasts courtship in the language of conflict. “Second blow” makes a return to action sound like an assault or counterstroke, while “fray” gives the amorous encounter the shape of a contest. Its emphasis falls not on who first desired whom, but on the action that converts an interval of suspension into a renewed engagement.

The narrator insists that this distinction is not merely verbal. By explaining why the affair should be named from Toby’s side, he uses the saying to organize the story’s account of agency and timing. The almost eleven-year pause is not erased; it is the condition that makes the later move count as the decisive blow.