Pray You, Sir, Whose Daughter?. Gardener Helen Hamilton

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СКАЧАТЬ should be quite common in his own life should be kept from, covered up, blurred into indistinction to her, came to her with a shock too sudden and heavy for words. She had built an exalted ideal of absolute mental companionship between those who loved. She had always thought that one day she should pass through the portals of some vast building by the side of a husband to whom all within was new as it would be to her. She had fancied that neither spoke; that both read the tablets of architecture – and of human legend on every face – so nearly alike that by a glance of the eye she could say to him, "I know what you are thinking of all this. It stirs such or such a memory. It strikes the chord that holds these thoughts or those." But she read as plainly now that this man who thought he loved her, whom she had grown to feel she might one day love, had no such conception of a union of lives. To him marriage would mean a physical possession of a toy more or less valuable, more or less to be cherished or to be set under a glass case, whenever his real life, his real thoughts, his deeper self were stirred. These were to be kept for men – his mentally developed equals. She understood full well that if she could have said this to him he would have been shocked, would have resented such a contemptuous interpretation of what he truly believed to be a wholly respectful love, offered upon wholly respectful terms. But to her, it seemed the mere tossing down of a filbert to a pretty kitten, that it might amuse him for a few moments with its graceful antics. When he tired of the kitten, or bethought him of the serious duties of life, he could turn the key and count on finding the amusing little creature to play with again next day in case he cared to relax himself with a sight of its gambols. She resented such a view of the value of her life. She was humiliated and indignant. The perfectly apparent lack of comprehension on his part of any lapse of respect in attitude toward her, the entire unconsciousness of the insult to her whole nature, in his assumption of a divine right of individual growth and development to which she had no claim, stung her beyond all power of speech. The very fact that he had no comprehension of the affront himself, added to it its utterly hopeless feature. The love of a man offered on such terms is an insult, she said, over and over to herself; but aloud she said nothing.

      She had heard, vaguely, through her tumult of feeling, his terms of endearment, his appeals to her tenderness and – alas! unfortunately for him – his apologies for having taken her to such a place. She became distinctly aware of these latter first and it steadied her. They had reached Washington Square.

      "Yes, that revelation in Mulberry Street was a horrible shock to me," she said, looking at him for the first time since they had entered the carriage; "but, do you know, I think there are more shocking things than even that done in the name of love every day – things as heartless and offensively uncomprehending of what is fine and true in life as that wretched woman's conduct with the lifeless form of her baby."

      He recognized a hard ring in her voice, but her eyes looked kind and gentle.

      "How do you mean?" he asked, touching her hand as it lay on her empty purse in her lap.

      "I don't believe I could ever make you understand what I mean, we are so hopelessly far apart," she said, a little sadly. "That an explanation is necessary – that is the hopeless part. That that poor woman did not comprehend that her conduct and callousness were shocking —that was the hopeless part. To make you understand what I mean would be like making her understand all the hundreds of awful things that her conduct meant to us. If it is not in one's nature to comprehend without words, then words are useless."

      His vehement protests stirred her sympathy again.

      "You say that love brings people near together. Do you know I am beginning to think that nothing could be a greater calamity than that? Drawn together by a love that rests on a physical basis for those who refuse to allow it root in a common sympathy and a community of thought it must fail sooner or later. A humbled acceptance of the crumbs of her husband's life, or a resentful endurance of it, may result from the accursed faithfulness or the pitiful dependence of wives, but surely – surely no greater calamity could befall her and no worse fate lie in wait for him."

      Her lover stared at her, pained and puzzled. When they reached her door he grasped her hand.

      "I thought you loved me last night, and I went away in an ecstasy of hope. Today – "

      "Perhaps I do love you," she said; "but I do not respect you, because you do not respect me." He made a quick sound of dissent, but she checked him. "You do not respect womanhood; you only patronize women – you only patronize me. I could not give you a right to do that for life. Good-bye. Don't come in this time. Wait. Let us both think."

      "Let us both think," he repeated, as he started down the street. "Think! Think what? I had no idea that Gertrude would be so utterly unreasonable. It is a girl's whim. She'll get over it, but it is deucedly uncomfortable while it lasts."

      "Mamma," said Gertrude, when she reached her mother's pretty room on the third floor. "Mamma, do you suppose if a girl really and truly loved a man that she would stop to think whether he had a high or a low estimate of womanhood?"

      The girl's mother looked up startled. She was quite familiar with what she had always termed the "superhumanly aged remarks" of her daughter, but the new turn they had taken surprised her.

      "I don't believe she would, Gertrude. Why? Are you imagining yourself in love with some man who is not chivalrous toward women?" Mrs. Foster smiled at the mere idea of her daughter caring much for any man. She thought she had observed her too closely to make a mistake in the matter.

      Gertrude evaded the first question.

      "I once heard a very brilliant man say – what I did not then understand – that chivalry was always the prelude to imposition. I believe I don't care very especially for chivalry. Fair play is better, don't you think so?" She did not pause for a reply, but began taking off her long gloves.

      "Which would you like best from papa, flattery or square-toed, honest truth?"

      Her mother laughed.

      "Gertrude, you are perfectly ridiculous. The institution of marriage, as now established, wouldn't hang together ten minutes if your square-toed, honest truth, as you call it, were to be tried between husbands and wives. Most wives are frightened nearly to death for fear they will become acquainted with the truth some day. They don't want it. They were not – built for it." Gertrude began to move about the room impatiently. Her mother smiled at her and went on: "Don't you look at it that way? No? Well, you are young yet. Wait until you've been married three years – "

      The girl turned upon her with an indignant face. Then suddenly she threw her arms about her mother's neck.

      "Poor mamma, poor mamma," she said. "Didn't you find out for three years after? How did you bear it? I should have committed suicide. I – "

      "Oh, no you wouldn't!" said her mother, with a bitter little inflection. "They all talk that way. Girls all feel so, if they know enough to feel at all – to think at all. They rage and wear out their nerves – as you are doing now, heaven knows why – and the beloved husband calls a doctor and buys sweets and travels with the precious invalid, and never once suspects that he is at the bottom of the whole trouble. It never dawns upon him that what she is dying for is a real and loyal companionship, such as she had fondly dreamed of, and not at all for sea air. It doesn't enter his mind that she feels humiliated because she knows that a great part of his life is a sealed book to her, and that he wishes to keep it so."

      She paused, and her daughter stroked her cheek. This was indeed a revelation to the girl. She had been wholly deceived by her mother's gay manner all these years. She was taking herself sharply to task now.

      "But by and by when she succeeds in killing all her self-respect; when she makes up her mind that the case is hopeless, and that she must expect absolutely no frankness in life beyond the limits of conventional СКАЧАТЬ