A Woman's Reason. William Dean Howells

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СКАЧАТЬ the East, for his wife to set about the tables and mantels; but these objects, so exquisite in themselves, so unyielding in composition, had long since disappeared. Some grotesque bronzes, picked up in Chinese ports, to which his early ventures had taken him, survived the expulsion of ivory carvings and Indian idols and genre statuettes in terra cotta, (like those you see in the East Indian Museum at Salem) and now found themselves, with the new feeling for oriental art, in the very latest taste. Tire others were bestowed in neglected drawers and shelves, along with boxes containing a wealth of ghastly rich and elaborate white crape shawls from China, and fantastically subtle cotton webs from India which Helen had always thought she should use in tableaux, and never had worn. Among the many pictures on the walls (there were too many), there were three Stuarts, the rest were of very indifferent merit; large figure paintings, or allegorical landscapes, after the taste of Cole and Poussin, in great carved and scrolly frames. Helen had once thought of making a raid upon these enemies of art, and in fact she had contemplated remodeling the whole equipment of the parlors, in conformity to the recent feeling in such matters; but she had not got further than the incomplete representation of some goldenrod and mullein-stalks upon the panels of her own chamber-door; and now that the fervor of her first enthusiasm had burnt itself out, she was not sorry she had left the old house in peace.

      "Oh, I should think you'd be so rejoiced," said the chief of her friends; "it's such a comfort to go into one house where you don't have to admire the artistic sentiment, and where every wretched little aesthetic prig of a table or a chair isn't asserting a principle or teaching a lesson. Don't touch a cobweb, Helen!" It had never even come to a talk between her and her father, and the house remained unmolested the home of her childhood. She had not really cared much for it since she was a child. The sense of our impermanent relation to the parental roof comes to us very early in life; and perhaps more keenly to a young girl than to her brothers. They are of the world by all the conditions of their active, positive being, almost from the first—a great world that is made for them; but she has her world to create. She cannot sit and adorn her father's house, as she shall one day beautify and worship her husband's; she can indeed do her duty by it, but the restless longing remains, and her housewifeliness does not voluntarily blossom out beyond the precincts of her own chamber, which she makes her realm of fancy and of dreams. She could not be the heart of the house if she would, as her mother is, or has been; and though in her mother's place, she can be housekeeper, thrifty, wise, and notable, still some mysterious essential is wanting which it is not in her nature to supply to her father's house.

      Helen went to her own room, and, flinging up the windows, let in the noises of the streets. A few feet went by in the secluded place, and a sound of more frequent trampling came from the street into which it opened. Further off rose the blurred tumult of business, softened by the stretch of the Common, and growing less and less with the lapse of the long summer day. It was already a little cooler, and the smell of the sprinkled street stole refreshingly in at the window. It was still very light, and when Helen opened her blinds, the room brightened cheerfully all about her, and the sympathetic intimacy of her own closest belongings tenderly appealed to her. After something has happened, and we first see familiar things about us as they were, there comes, just before the sense of difference in ourselves returns to torment us, a moment of blind and foolish oblivion, and this was Helen's as she sat down beside the window, and looked round upon the friendly prettiness of her room. It had been her room when she was a child, and there were childish keepsakes scattered about in odd places, out of the way of young-ladyish luxuries, high-shouldered bottles of perfume, and long-handled ivory brushes, and dainty boxes and cases, and starred and beveled hand-glasses, and other sacred mysteries of toilet. Of the period when she had thought herself wedded to art there were certain charcoal sketches pinned against the wall, and in one corner, not very definite at first glance under the draperies tossed upon it from time to time, was her easel. On projections of her mirror-frame hung souvenirs of Robert's first cruise, which had been in the Mediterranean : ropes of Roman pearls; nets and bracelets and necklaces of shells and beads from Venice; filigree silver jewelry from Genoa; strands and rosaries of black, barbarically scented wooden beads from the Levant: not things you could wear at all, but very pleasant to have; they gave a sentiment to your room when you brought any one into it; they were nice to have lying about, and people liked to take them into their hands: they were not so very uncommon, either, that you had to keep telling what they were. She had never thought that possibly Robert had expected her to wear the absurd things. With an aching recurrence to their quarrel (it could be called no less) and a penitent self-pity, she thought of it now. It did not seem to her that she could touch them, but she went languidly to the mirror and took some of them down, and then all at once fantastically began to array herself in them: like a mad girl, she reflected. She threw the loops of Roman pearls and the black strands of Levantine beads about her neck; she set a net of the Venetian shell-work on her hair, and decked her wrists and her lovely ears with the Genoese filigree; a perfectly frantic combination, she mused, as she shook her head a little to make the ear-bobs dance. "Yes, perfectly frantic," she said aloud, but not much thinking of the image confronting her from the mirror, thinking rather of Robert, and poignantly regretting that she had never put them on for him; and thinking that if the loss of him had made her certain about him too late for ever, how fatally strange that would be. Again she went over all the facts of the affair, and was able to make much surer of Robert's motives than of her own. She knew that if he had understood her saying that she might have loved him once to be any encouragement for the future, he would not have written as he did. She could imagine Robert's being very angry at the patronizing tone of the rest of her letter; she had entire faith in his stupidity; she never doubted his generosity, his magnanimous incapability of turning her refusal of him into a refusal of her; his was not the little soul that could rejoice in such a chance. She wondered if now, far out at sea, sailing, sailing away, three years away, from her, he saw anything in her letter but refusal; or was he still in that blind rage? Did he never once think that it had seemed such a great thing for her to make confession, which meant him to come to her? But had she really meant that? It seemed so now, but perhaps then she had only thought of mingling a drop of kindness in his bitter cup, of trying to spare him the mortification of having loved a person who had never thought for a moment of loving him? From time to time, her image appeared to advance upon her from the depths of the mirror, decked in all that incongruous frippery, and to say with trembling lips, "Perfectly frantic, perfectly frantic," while the tears ran down its face; and she found a wild comfort in regarding herself as quite an insane, irresponsible creature, who did not know what she was about. She felt that fate ought not to hold her to account. The doorbell rang, and she snatched the net from her hair with a fearful shudder, and flung down all the ornaments in a heap upon her dressing-table. Bumping sounds in the hall below reminded her that in her trance before the glass, she had remotely known of a wagon stopping at the door, and presently she heard Margaret coming up the stairs behind the panting express-man who was fetching up her trunk. She fled into another room, and guiltily lurked there till they went Out again, before she returned to unlock and unpack the box. It was one of Helen's economies not to drive home from the station, but to send her baggage by express and come up in a horsecar. The sums thus saved she devoted to a particular charity, and was very rigid with herself about spending every half-dollar coach-fare for that object. She only gave twenty-five cents to the express, and she made a merit of the fact that neither the coach-hire nor the charity ever cost her father anything. Robert had once tried to prove that it always cost him seventy-five cents, but she had easily seen through the joke, and had made him confess it.

      She was still busy unpacking when Margaret came up to say that her father was awake now, and then she left off at once to go to him. The gas had been lighted in the hall and library, and that made life another thing. Her father was in his armchair, and was feeling decidedly better, he said; he had told Margaret to have tea there in the library. Helen laughed at him for having two teas within two hours; he owned to being hungry, and that reminded her that she had eaten nothing since an early dinner. When the tea and toast came in, and the cloth was laid half across the round table, in the mellow light of the study lamp, they were very cozy. Helen, who was always thinking of Robert, whatever else she thought of, began to play in fancy at a long life of devotion to her father, in which she should never marry. She had always imagined him living with her, but now she was living with him, and they were to grow old together; in twenty СКАЧАТЬ