Katharine had been intimate with Hester Crowdie from the time when they
had both been children, though Hester was several years older than she.
Possibly the friendship had been one of Katharine’s mistakes. For his
part, Ralston, as has been seen, did not place great confidence in the
married woman’s nature, and if he did not tell Katharine exactly what he
thought, it was not from lack of conviction but because he felt that the
conviction itself was intuitive rather than logical. Men, as well as
women, have intuitions which they cannot explain, but they are much more
inclined to conceal them than women are, because they have been taught
not to trust to them. They judge others, and especially they judge
women, from small facts which they are often ashamed of seeming to value
so highly. At least, when they analyze their feelings about any given
woman, it often happens that their reasoning leads up to some detail
which, standing alone, must and does appear altogether insignificant. It
is not easy to decide whether such very small causes among the realities
actually produce the whole consequence which affects the mind, or
whether man’s view of woman and woman’s view of man, as distinguished
from the judgments each forms upon his and her own sex, is not dependent
upon a very subtle sense of truth, acting by paths shorter than logical
deduction.
In illustration and as an example it may be noticed that the eyes of the
majority of persons convey the consciousness of numbers precisely, up to
a certain point, without any operation of counting. Most people can say
at a glance, of any small group of objects, that there are two, three,
four, or even seven. With almost all individuals, counting, and counting
from the beginning, becomes necessary when there are eight or more
objects together. For though the eye embraces seven, as seven, it cannot
embrace seven out of eight and count one more to make up the number. If
there is any counting it must be done from the very beginning.
Similarly, in reading rapidly, there are many who do not read every
word. Their eyes and intelligence seize upon and comprehend blocks of
words and even of lines, by a series of spasmodic leaps, as it were,
after each one of which there is a pause of very short and hardly
perceptible duration. Those who have been obliged to read very quickly,
such as readers of manuscripts, and especially professional critics of
second-class literature, are perfectly well aware of this faculty. Such
men often read through and judge several volumes in a day, a fact which
would not be possible if they had to read each word of every sentence.
It is not well done, as Dr. Johnson would have said, but we are
surprised to see it done at all. The result, in the modern phrase, is
not judgment, but tasting. But it is a result, all the same. By force of
a habit which cannot by any means be acquired by every one, words and
even blocks of words to a great number have become to such a reader as
symbols, which convey to his mind an idea all at once. There is no doubt
but that by easy stages real symbols could, in our ordinary books, take
the place of long sentences, and convey meaning without words at all.
All forms of religion have made use of such symbols, and there is no
reason why they could not be used in printing, though there may be
excellent reasons why they should not be adopted. But in reading, as in
counting, when the meaning of a whole sentence is not understood at a
glance, it becomes necessary to read it from the beginning, word by
word, or by shorter blocks of words, just as it is necessary to spell
out a single word, such as a name, if it is not familiar at first sight,
and is not made up of familiar syllables.
And in this way, perhaps, the mind of one individual judges the whole
personality of another, without going through any form of analysis or
any enumeration of qualities and defects. The instinctive attraction of
opposite sexes for one another sharpens the faculties of all living
creatures, and hence it may possibly be, that men generally understand
women better than men, and the converse, that women are better judges of
men than they are of other women. It is often true that the combined
judgment passed by a man and woman in consultation upon any individual
is vague and worthless, though in rare cases where a profound and
wide-reaching sympathy really exists, such joint judgment is the best in
the world.
This may be a mere theory, or it may be the truth, but at all events it
seems simpler to believe that what we call intuition is founded upon
some such appreciation of each individual as a symbol representing a set
of thoughts, than to suppose that it is a sort of sixth sense, sometimes
amounting to second sight. Every one may judge of that out of his own
experience.
Ralston, who was familiar enough with the character of his family in all
its branches, thought that he saw in Hester Crowdie a sort of
modification of the same love of possession which made a miser of
Alexander Junior, and which, if opposed, would be as ruthless and as
dangerous. He might have been willing to admit that he had a share of
the same peculiarity, quality, or defect, himself. The tenacity of his
love for Katharine proved that he had it. But as he disliked Crowdie so
sincerely, Hester’s passion for her husband seemed abnormal in his
eyes. He fancied that if it were crossed or thwarted she would be
capable of going to any extremity for its sake. Her friendship for
Katharine, in his opinion, might be turned to hatred at a moment’s
notice.
The friendship of a passionate woman who seeks an outlet for the
confidences of her overflowing nature, rather than the companionship and
mutual respect which friendship means, if it means anything, is always
selfish and generally dangerous. It has no elements of stability in it.
When she has no more confidences to make she is silent, not
companionable. When she has exhausted sympathy by the often repeated
tale of her own minor experiences or of her woes, real or imaginary, and
when the response of the worn-out listener grows more dull or slow, she
believes that she has exhausted also her friend’s heart, that it is
shallow and arid, and she turns away in disgust and disappointment,
seeking a kindred soul. And that is the end of many friendships between
women. As often as not, they are founded upon the irresistible desire to
make confidences, experienced by one or both of the fancied friends, and
they come to an end when confidence no longer elicits sympathy. There is
neither the simple delight in companionship which requires no emotion,
nor the active intellectual principle on both sides which finds pleasure
in the free trade of thought without subjection to the exigent tariff
which exacts the duty of pity or admiration and unhesitatingly excludes
those who have neither to pay, from intellectual commerce.
The less impulsive, the less passionate woman of the two, she who
receives all this outpouring of the shallow but easily agitated soul, is
the one who is imposed upon. Until she has had experience, she believes
in sufferings and joys commensurate with the words which express both,
and even greater. Her pity is really excited; her admiration is genuine;
she sheds tears sympathetic, and glows with pride vicarious. Her slow
nature is roused, and its activity continues after the truth begins to
dawn upon her. Then, all at once, she finds out that truth, and suffers
the rude shock which a less stable being would scarcely feel. She is the
one who suffers. The other merely wonders why her confidences no longer
interest her friend, and lets them boil over in a new direction. Not
knowing what real friendship means, she who loses it loses nothing. What
she misses is the pity and also the admiration which helped her to pity
and admire herself, and she can get both elsewhere. But the stronger,
more silent woman, broods over her disenchantment and loses her belief
in human nature, which is the key to human happiness, as faith in God is
the key to heaven. She will not easily be drawn into such friendship
again, and is quick to scoff at it in others.
For the disenchantment of broken friendship is less violent but more
deep-reaching than the disenchantment of broken love-faith. Love is for
the one, friendship is, or may be, for the many. There is no natural
reason why any man or woman whom we meet, should never become our
friend. To lose faith in human nature may sometimes render love
impossible. But though one woman have betrayed us, and though we say in
our heart that men and women are faithless in love, yet we have not
therefore said that all humanity is faithless in all that which makes up
friendship.
Friendship is more composite than love, and becomes more and more so
with advancing years, as the whole of life, which made such a hugely
noble impression upon our young sight, is dissected, bit by bit, before
the weary eyes that have seen it too long, and before the tribunal of a
heart that has known bitterness. Friendship, like charity, covers a
multitude of sins. The rending of it shows them as they are, and they
are not beautiful.
Katharine had of late gone through events which had tended to destroy
the whole-heartedness of her view of the world and its people. Within
the past six months her character had developed, if it had not changed,
and if she was more in earnest about her realities, she was harder in
judging her imaginings and in testing anything in the nature of an ideal
which presented itself to her moral vision. She would have made a
firmer friend now, than formerly, but her friendship was also much
harder to obtain.
She was, doubtless, quite truthful to herself in what she thought of her
own mother, for instance. They were altogether reconciled for the
present, and outwardly their intercourse was what it had been before
Mrs. Lauderdale’s unreasoning envy had almost brought about a permanent
estrangement. But the fact remained that the estrangement had come,
though it had also gone again, and Katharine felt that it might possibly
some day return. The childlike faith, the belief that her mother could
do nothing wrong, which is one of childhood’s happiest tenets, was
destroyed forever. Her mother, henceforth, was as other women were in
her eyes, nearer to her, by the natural bonds that bound the two
together and by the necessary intercourse of daily life, but not in
heart nor in real sympathy. Katharine asked herself coldly what an
affection could be worth which could hate its object out of pure vanity;
and the answer was that it could not be worth much. But she never
underrated its true value in the newly discovered proof of its
fallibility.
Evidently, she was going far--too far, perhaps, for justice and
certainly too far for happiness. And she applied her conclusion not only
to her own mother, but to all handsome mothers who had pretty
daughters. The first breath of envy would poison any mother’s love she
thought, and the memories of her own childhood were poisoned
retrospectively by the bitterness of the present. She was at that stage
of growth when generalities have a force which they have never acquired
before and which they soon lose, as life’s hailstorm of exceptions
batters them out of shape. Out of isolated facts she made them, and made
of them rules, and of rules, laws.
As for her father’s conduct, it had been less unexpected, though it had
hurt her even more, because it had crossed her own path so much more
rudely and directly. But it had helped to destroy other illusions, and
in a way to undermine something which was not an illusion at all. She
had always believed in his courage and manliness, and both had, in her
opinion, broken down. No man could be brave, she felt, who treated any
woman as her father had treated her, and the mere thought of the past
scenes of violence sent a thrill of pain to her injured arm. No man
could be manly who could wish to sacrifice his daughter as she
considered that he had wished to sacrifice her--to sell her, as she said
in her anger.
There was injustice in this. Archibald Wingfield was one of the most
desirable and desired young men in New York. Having made up his mind
that Katharine should not marry Ralston, Alexander Junior could hardly
have done better for her than he did in trying to bring about a match
with Wingfield. But there Katharine was influenced by her love for John,
which made her look upon the mere suggestion of a rival as an insult
hardly to be forgiven.
The deeper and less apparent wound in her belief was the more dangerous,
though she did not know it. Alexander Junior had always professed to act
upon the most rigid religious principles, and though Katharine did not
sympathize with the form of worship in which she had been brought up,
and had at one time been strongly inclined to become a Roman Catholic,
as her mother was, she had, nevertheless, accorded a certain degree of
admiration to her father’s unbending and uncompromising consistency.
There was no gentleness and no consolation in such religion, she
thought, but she could not help admiring its strength and directness.
She had said, too, that her father was faithful in his love for her
mother, a fact which seemed suddenly to have lost its weight in her eyes
at present. But of late he had done many things which Katharine was sure
could not be justified by any religion whatsoever, and had shown
tendencies which, if his religion had ever been real, should, in her
view, have been stamped out or wholly destroyed long ago. His avarice
was one of them, his cruelty to herself another, his attempt to injure
John Ralston in Mr. Beman’s opinion was a third. And all these
tendencies were as strong as himself and could not be easily hidden nor
charitably overlooked. Not knowing the real strength of any great
passion, she could not realize that there might have been a conflict in
her father’s heart. To children, real sin seems as monstrous as real
virtue seems to those who have sinned often, and in respect of real sin,
Katharine was yet but a child. She saw a man doing wrong, who said that
he acted in accordance with the principles of his religion. She
overlooked his temptations, she ignored his struggles, she said that he
was bad and called his religion a fiction.
The direct consequence was that such convictions as she had herself were
undermined and shaken and almost ruined, and the moral disturbance
affected her in all the relations of life, except, perhaps, in her love
for John Ralston, which grew stronger as other things failed.
With regard to her friendship for Hester, however, it had not, as yet,
suffered any rude shock.