August 1. I said a thing to Tom to-day which was the most natural thing
in the world, yet which teases me. He came to pay one of his rare visits
to baby, and we were bending over her so that our heads were almost
together. I was not thinking of him, but just of Tomine, and without
considering how he might take it I declared that I felt exactly as if
she were my very own.
"What do you mean?" Tom asked. "She is yours."
"Oh, but I mean as if I were really her mother," I explained, stupidly
making my mistake worse.
"Would to God you were!" he burst out. "Would to God you cared enough
for me to be now!"
I was of course startled, though I had brought it on myself. I got out
of it by jumping up and calling to Rosa to take Tomine and give her her
supper. Now recalling it, and remembering how Tom looked, his eyes and
his voice, I wonder what I ought to do. I do not know how to make him
understand that because George has left me I am no more likely to marry
somebody else. I may not feel the same toward George, but nothing
follows from that. I own to myself frankly that I respect Tom more than
I do George; I can even say that I find more and more as time goes on
that I had rather see Tom coming up the walk. The old boy and girl
friendship has largely come back between Tom and me; and I am a little,
just a little on the defensive on his account against the talk of the
village. I think now all is over, and Julia in her grave, that might be
allowed to rest. Only one thing I do not understand. I am no more moved
by the touch of George's hand now than by that of any acquaintance; I
cannot touch Tom's fingers without remembering Julia.
August 2. It is curious to see how Rosa's heart and her religion keep up
the struggle. Ran's wife has obstinately refused to die, but has instead
got well enough to send Rosa an insulting message; so the hope of
finding a solution of all difficulties in Ran's becoming a widower is
for the present at least abandoned. Rosa is evidently fond of Ran, and
while the priest and her conscience--or rather her religious fear of
consequences--keep her from marrying him, they cannot make her give him
up entirely. She still clings to some sort of an engagement with Dennis;
and she still talks in her amazingly cold-blooded way about her lovers,
speculating on the practical side of the question in a fashion so
dispassionate that Ran's chance would seem to be gone forever; but in
the end she comes back to him. What the result will be I cannot even
guess, but I feel it my duty not to encourage Rosa to incline toward
Ran, who is really drunken and disreputable. I remind her how he beat
his wife; but then she either says any man with spunk must beat his wife
now and then when he isn't sober, or she declares that anybody might and
indeed should beat that sort of a woman. I can only fall back upon the
fact that she cannot marry him without incurring the displeasure of her
church, and although she never fails to retort that I do not believe in
her religion, I can see that the argument moves her. In dealing with
Rosa it is very easy to see how necessary a religion is for the
management of the ignorant and unreasonable. In this case the obstinacy
of Rosa's attachment may prove too strong for the church, but the church
is the only thing which in her undisciplined mind could combat her
inclination for a moment.
Sometimes when Rosa appeals to me for sympathy I wonder whether genuine
love is not entirely independent of reason; and I wonder, too, whether
it is or is not a feeling which must last a whole life long. I seem to
myself to be sure that if I had married George I should always have
loved him,--or I should have loved the image of him I kept in my mind. I
would have defied proof and reason, and whatever he did I should have
persuaded myself that no matter what circumstances led him to do he was
really noble in his nature. I know I should have stultified myself to
the very end, rather than to give up caring for him; and it seems to me
that I should have done it with my mental eyes shut. I should have been
hardly less illogical about it than Rosa is. What puzzles me most is
that while I can analyze myself in this lofty way, I believe I have in
me possibilities of self-deception so complete. Whether it is a virtue
in women to be able to cheat themselves into constancy I can't tell, and
indeed I think all these speculations decidedly sentimental and
unprofitable.
August 5. Aunt Naomi came to-day, like an east wind bearing depression.
She has somehow got hold of a rumor that George is speculating. Where
she obtained her information I could not discover. She likes to be a
little mysterious, and she pieces together so many small bits of
information that I dare say it would often be hard for her to say
exactly what the source of her information really was. She is sometimes
mistaken, but for anybody who tells so many things she is surprisingly
seldom entirely wrong. Besides I half think that in a village like ours
thoughts escape and disseminate themselves. I am sometimes almost afraid
as I write things down in this indiscreet diary of mine, lest they shall
somehow get from the page into the air, and Aunt Naomi will know them
the next time she appears. This is to me the worst thing about living in
a small place. It is impossible not to have the feeling of being under a
sort of foolish slavery to public opinion, a slavish regard to feelings
we neither share nor respect; and greater still is the danger of coming
to be interested in trifles, of growing to be gossips just as we are
rustics, simply from living where it is so difficult not to know all
about our neighbors.
Speculation was the word which to-day Aunt Naomi rolled as a sweet
morsel under her tongue. Any sort of financial dealing is so strangely
far away from our ordinary village ways that any sort of dealing in
stocks would, I suppose, be regarded as dangerously rash, if not
altogether unlawful; but I do hope that there is nothing in George's
business which will lead him into trouble. I know that I am bothering
about something which is none of my affair, and which is probably all
right, if it has any existence.
"I don't know much about speculation myself," Aunt Naomi observed; "and
I doubt if George Weston does. He's got a wife who seems bound to spend
every cent she can get hold of, and it looks as if he found he'd got to
take extra pains to get it."
"But how should anybody know anything about his affairs?" I asked in
perplexed vexation.
She regarded me shrewdly.
"Everybody knows everything in a place like this," she responded
waggishly. "I'm sure I don't see how everything gets to be known, but it
does. You can't deny that."
I told her that I was afraid we were dreadfully given to gossiping about
our neighbors, and to talking about things which really didn't concern
us.
"Some do, I suppose," she answered coolly, but with a twinkle from
behind the green veil which is always aslant across her face. "It's a
pity, of course; but you wouldn't have us so little interested in each
other as not to notice the things we hear, would you?"