Men and women are much more like each other in certain large elements of
character than is generally supposed, but it is that very resemblance
which makes their differences the more incomprehensible to each other;
just as in politics, theology, or that most disputatious of all things
disputable, metaphysics, the nearer the reasoners approach each other in
points that to an uncritical bystander seem the most important, the more
sure they are to start off in opposite directions upon reaching the speck
of a pin-prick.
Now there are certain grand meeting-places between man and woman--the
grandest of all is on the ground of love, and yet here also is the great
field of quarrel. And here the teller of a tale such as mine ought, if
he is sufficiently wise to be humble, to know that it is almost
profanation if, as man, he presumes to enter the penetralia of a woman's
innermost heart, and repeat, as a man would repeat, all the vibrations of
sound which the heart of a woman sends forth undistinguishable even to
her own ear.
I know Isaura as intimately as if I had rocked her in her cradle, played
with her in her childhood, educated and trained her in her youth; and yet
I can no more tell you faithfully what passed in her mind during the
forty-eight hours that intervened between her conversation with that
American lady and her reappearance in some commonplace drawing-room, than
I can tell you what the Man in the Moon might feel if the sun that his
world reflected were blotted out of creation.
I can only say that when she reappeared in that commonplace drawing-room
world, there was a change in her face not very perceptible to the
ordinary observer. If anything, to his eye she was handsomer--the eye
was brighter--the complexion (always lustrous, though somewhat pale, the
limpid paleness that suits so well with dark hair) was yet more
lustrous,--it was flushed into delicate rose hues--hues that still better
suit with dark hair. What, then, was the change, and change not for the
better? The lips, once so pensively sweet, had grown hard; on the brow
that had seemed to laugh when the lips did, there was no longer sympathy
between brow and lip; there was scarcely seen a fine threadlike line that
in a few years would be a furrow on the space between the eyes; the voice
was not so tenderly soft; the step was haughtier. What all such change
denoted it is for a woman to decide-I can only guess. In the mean while,
Mademoiselle Cicogna had sent her servant daily to inquire after M.
Rameau. That, I think, she would have done under any circumstances.
Meanwhile, too, she had called on Madame Savarin--made it up with her
--sealed the reconciliation by a cold kiss. That, too, under any
circumstances, I think she would have done--under some circumstances
the kiss might have been less cold.
There was one thing unwonted in her habits. I mention it, though it is
only a woman who can say if it means anything worth noticing.
For six days she had left a letter from Madame de Grantmesnil unanswered.
With Madame de Grantmesnil was connected the whole of her innermost life
--from the day when the lonely desolate child had seen, beyond the dusty
thoroughfares of life, gleams of the faery land in poetry and art-onward
through her restless, dreamy, aspiring youth-onward--onward--till now,
through all that constitutes the glorious reality that we call romance.
Never before had she left for two days unanswered letters which were to
her as Sibylline leaves to some unquiet neophyte yearning for solutions
to enigmas suggested whether by the world without or by the soul within.
For six days Madame de Grantmesnil's letter remained unanswered, unread,
neglected, thrust out of sight; just as when some imperious necessity
compels us to grapple with a world that is, we cast aside the romance
which, in our holiday hours, had beguiled us to a world with which we
have interests and sympathies no more.