It is long since I wrote you, and you have had reason enough to be
impatient of my silence. I submit to the reproaches of your letter, with
a due sense of my blame; whether I am altogether to blame, you shall say
after you have read this.
I cannot yet decide whether I have lost a great happiness, the greatest
that could come to any man, or escaped the worst misfortune that could
befall me. But, such as it is, I will try to set the fact honestly down.
I do not know whether you had any conjecture, from my repeated mention of
a lady whose character greatly interested me, that I was in the way of
feeling any other interest in her than my letters expressed. I am no
longer young, though at thirty-five an Altrurian is by no means so old as
an American at the same age. The romantic ideals of the American women
which I had formed from the American novels had been dissipated; if I had
any sentiment towards them, as a type, it was one of distrust, which my
very sense of the charm in their inconsequence, their beauty, their
brilliancy, served rather to intensify. I thought myself doubly defended
by that difference between their civilization and ours which forbade
reasonable hope of happiness in any sentiment for them tenderer than
that of the student of strange effects in human nature. But we have not
yet, my dear Cyril, reasoned the passions, even in Altruria.
After I last wrote you, a series of accidents, or what appeared so, threw
me more and more constantly into the society of Mrs. Strange. We began to
laugh at the fatality with which we met everywhere--at teas, at lunches,
at dinners, at evening receptions, and even at balls, where I have been a
great deal, because, with all my thirty-five years, I have not yet
outlived that fondness for dancing which has so often amused you in me.
Wherever my acquaintance widened among cultivated people, they had no
inspiration but to ask us to meet each other, as if there were really no
other woman in New York who could be expected to understand me. “You must
come to lunch (or tea, or dinner, whichever it might be), and we will
have her. She will be so much interested to meet you.”
But perhaps we should have needed none of these accidents to bring us
together. I, at least, can look back and see that, when none of them
happened, I sought occasions for seeing her, and made excuses of our
common interest in this matter and in that to go to her. As for her, I
can only say that I seldom failed to find her at home, whether I called
upon her nominal day or not, and more than once the man who let me in
said he had been charged by Mrs. Strange to say that, if I called, she
was to be back very soon; or else he made free to suggest that, though
Mrs. Strange was not at home, Mrs. Gray was; and then I found it easy
to stay until Mrs. Strange returned. The good old lady had an insatiable
curiosity about Altruria, and, though I do not think she ever quite
believed in our reality, she at least always treated me kindly, as if I
were the victim of an illusion that was thoroughly benign.
I think she had some notion that your letters, which I used often to take
with me and read to Mrs. Strange and herself, were inventions of mine;
and the fact that they bore only an English postmark confirmed her in
this notion, though I explained that in our present passive attitude
towards the world outside we had as yet no postal relations with other
countries, and, as all our communication at home was by electricity, that
we had no letter-post of our own. The very fact that she belonged to a
purer and better age in America disqualified her to conceive of Altruria;
her daughter, who had lived into a full recognition of the terrible
anarchy in which the conditions have ultimated here, could far more
vitally imagine us, and to her, I believe, we were at once a living
reality. Her perception, her sympathy, her intelligence, became more and
more to me, and I escaped to them oftener and oftener, from a world where
an Altrurian must be so painfully at odds. In all companies here I am
aware that I have been regarded either as a good joke or a bad joke,
according to the humor of the listener, and it was grateful to be taken
seriously.
From the first I was sensible of a charm in her, different from that I
felt in other American women, and impossible in our Altrurian women. She
had a deep and almost tragical seriousness, masked with a most winning
gayety, a light irony, a fine scorn that was rather for herself than for
others. She had thought herself out of all sympathy with her environment;
she knew its falsehood, its vacuity, its hopelessness; but she
necessarily remained in it and of it. She was as much at odds in it as I
was, without my poor privilege of criticism and protest, for, as she
said, she could not set herself up as a censor of things that she must
keep on doing as other people did. She could have renounced the world, as
there are ways and means of doing here; but she had no vocation to the
religious life, and she could not feign it without a sense of sacrilege.
In fact, this generous and magnanimous and gifted woman was without that
faith, that trust in God which comes to us from living His law, and
which I wonder any American can keep. She denied nothing; but she had
lost the strength to affirm anything. She no longer tried to do good from
her heart, though she kept on doing charity in what she said was a mere
mechanical impulse from the belief of other days, but always with the
ironical doubt that she was doing harm. Women are nothing by halves, as
men can be, and she was in a despair which no man can realize, for we
have always some if or and which a woman of the like mood casts from her
in wild rejection. Where she could not clearly see her way to a true
life, it was the same to her as an impenetrable darkness.
You will have inferred something of all this from what I have written of
her before, and from words of hers that I have reported to you. Do you
think it so wonderful, then, that in the joy I felt at the hope, the
solace, which my story of our life seemed to give her, she should become
more and more precious to me? It was not wonderful, either, I think, that
she should identify me with that hope, that solace, and should suffer
herself to lean upon me, in a reliance infinitely sweet and endearing.
But what a fantastic dream it now appears!