"Why deny it, Leo? Let us at least be frankly realistic, and 'call a
spade a spade' when we set ourselves to dig ditches, draining the
stagnant pools of life. Each human being has a special goal toward
which he or she strains, with nineteen chances out of twenty against
reaching it in time; and if it be won, is it worth the race? With some
of us it is love, ambition, mundane prosperity; with others,
intellectual supremacy, moral perfection, exalted spirituality,
sublimated altruism; but after all, in the final analysis, it is only
hedonism! Each struggles with teeth and claws for that which gives the
largest promise of pleasure to body, mind, or soul, as the individual
happens to incline. To Sybarites the race is too short to be fatiguing,
and the goal is only an ambuscade for satiety and ennui; to ascetics,
the race course stretches to the borders of futurity, but even for them
one form of pleasure, spiritual pleasure, lights up eternity. The thing
we want, we want; not because of its orthodoxy, or its excellency or
beauty PER SE; we want it because it gratifies some idiosyncratic
craving of our threefold natures. The good things of this world are
very adroitly and ingeniously labelled, but we rummage in the
bonbonniere for a certain marron glace, and if it be not there, all the
caramels in Venice, all the 'gluko' in Greece, all the rahatlicum in
Turkey will not appease us."
With her arms thrown back, and clasped around the satin cushion crushed
against her head and shoulders, Miss Cutting lay on a red plush divan
in her father's picture gallery at home; and the swathing folds of a
topaz-hued surah gown embroidered with scarlet poppies half concealed
the feet that beat a tattoo on the polished oak floor.
"Then you have missed your marron glace?" answered Leo, turning from
the contemplation of a new picture which Mr. Cutting had recently added
to his collection.
"Of course. Do not all of us sooner or later? Where is yours? Safe
under lock and key, or hanging on some crag, ripening for the
confectioner; or filched by some stealthy white hand, devoured by some
eager lips that smile derisively at you while they nibble?"
From beneath drooping lids, Alma's oblique glance noted the result of
her Scipio Africanus' tactics.
"Alma, too intemperate and prolonged diet of sweets has ruined your
digestion; has rendered you an ethical dyspeptic. A surfeit of sugar
betrays itself in fermentation, and you have reached the stage of moral
acidulation."
"Ah, don't drift into homiletics! I see your marron grows hard by the
vineyard where sour grapes flourish. Leo, I am not so serenely proud as
you, but a trifle more honest, and I have cried for my bonbon, never
flouting its delicious flavor; hence, when I am ordered back to boiled
milk and oatmeal, I make no feint to disguise my wry faces."
Alma's low, teasing laugh stung like some persistent buzzing insect,
and a slight flush tinged her companion's cheek as she replied:
"Why plunge to the opposite extreme? You will starve on that porridge
you are desperately preparing for yourself."
"What else remains? This world is a huge bazaar, a big church fair, and
like other eager-eyed children I promptly set my heart on the great
'bisc' doll with its head turning coquettishly from side to side,
singing snatches from 'La Grande Duchcsse', and clad like Sheba's
queen! I stake all my pennies on a chance in the raffle, which has a
'consolation prize' hidden away from vulgar gaze. By and by the dice
rattle, and over my head, quite out of my reach, is borne the coveted
beauty (owned now by a girl I know), bowing and singing to the new
owner, who exultantly exhibits her as she departs; and into my
outstretched arms falls something hideous enough to play Medusa in a
tableau, a rag baby with grinning Senegambian lips, rayless owlish
eyes, and a concave nose whose nostrils suggest the Catacombs! Bitter
rage and murderous fury possess me, but I am much too wise to show my
tempers at the fair; so I hug my 'consolation prize', and get away as
fast as possible with my treasure, and once safe from observation, box,
deride, trample upon it, and toss it into the garret as suitable prey
for dust, cobwebs and mildew! After a time, the keenness of the
disappointment dulls, like all other human aches that do not kill, and
by degrees I think less vindictively of the despised substitute.
Finally comes a day, when all else failing to amuse me, I creep
sheepishly into the attic and pick up the rejected, and persuade myself
it is at least better than no doll at all, and forthwith adorn it with
rags of finery; but the echoes of 'La Grande Duchesse' will always ring
in my ears, and through the halo of tears I see ever and anon the prize
beauty that was withheld. The two-edged sword in the diablerie of fate
is, that we are ordained to fret after 'bisc,' when stuffed rags have
been meted out as our share of the fair."
Leo drew a chair near the divan and seated herself; looking steadily
into the velvety black eyes that instead of betraying hid, like a
domino, the soul of their owner.
"Alma, better cross empty arms forever over empty heart, than mock your
womanhood by acceptance of a 'consolation prize'."
"We all say that the day after the fair; but wait a few years as I have
done; and like all your sisters in the ranks of the disappointed, you
will ultimately crawl back to the attic and kiss the thick lips, and
try to persuade yourself the nose is not so formidable, though
certainly a trifle less classic than Antinous's! We set out with our
eyes fixed on Vega, blazing above, and flaunt our banner--'tout ou
rien!'--but when the campaign ends, Vega laughs at us from the horizon,
quitting our world; and we console ourselves with a rushlight, and
shelter it carefully from the wind with another flag: 'Quand on n'a pas
ce qu'on aime, il faut aimer ce qu'on a!' Such is the worldly wisdom
that comes with ripening years, like the deep stain on the sunny side
of a peach. Moreover, 'folding empty arms,' is only melodrama metaphor,
and 'empty hearts' are, begging your pardon, only figments of romantic
brains. Our hearts aren't empty, more's the pity! They hold deep, deep,
the image of Vega, and the flare of the tallow eandle on the surface
serves as cross lights to dazzle the world, and help us to hide the
reflection of our star. I saw that metaphor in some novel, and
recognize its truth. Do you, my princess?"
"I will never so utterly degrade myself. I could neither lower my
standard, nor sacrifice my ideal," said Leo, with a touch of scorn in
her usually gentle voice.
"You prefer that your ideal should sacrifice you? One enjoys for a
season the wide expanse visible from that lofty emotional pinnacle; but
the atmosphere is too rarefied, and we gladly descend to the warm,
denser air of the plains of common sense selfishness. If it be lowering
your standard to become the wife of a bishop (the youngest ever
ordained in his State), clothed with the double distilled odors of
sanctity and popularity, then heaven help your standard, which only
heaven can fitly house."
"Since you persist in assuming that so flattering an offer has been
made me, I will set this subject at rest, by a final assurance that
even were your surmise correct, I could never under any imaginable
circumstances marry my cousin, Bishop Douglass. Although I trust and
reverence him beyond all other men, 'I love my cousin cousinly, no
more,' and he is too much absorbed by his holy office and its solemn
responsibilities, to waste thought on the frail, sweet, rosy garland of
any woman's love. Fret yourself no longer in casting matrimonial
horoscopes for me."
The flushed cheeks, and a certain icy curtness in Leo's tone, warned
her companion that she was rashly invading sacred precincts.
"Eight years ago I made the solemn asseveration that I would never
marry; and I ran as a raw recruit to swell the army of foolish virgins
who lost all the wedding splendors, the hypothetical 'cakes and ale',
for want of the oil of worldly wisdom. Now I am thirty-three, and my
lamp is filled to the brim, and the bridegroom is in sight. Why not?
Adverse weather, rain, rust and mildew spoiled my beautiful golden
harvest ten years ago, but aftermath is better than bare stubble
fields, and though you miss the song of the reapers, you escape
starvation. Deny it as we may, we are hopelessly given over to
fetichism, and each one of us ties around her stone image some
beguiling orthodox label. Leo, yours is pride, masquerading in the dun
garb of 'religious duty'. Mine is self-love, pure and simple, the
worldly weal of Alma Cutting; but nominally it is dubbed 'grateful
requital of a life of devotion' in my lover! You grieve over my
heartlessness? That is the one compensation time brings, when men and
women have killed the best in our natures. Teeth ache fiercely; then
the nerve dies, and we have surcease from pain, and find comfort in
knowing that the darkening wreck can throb no more. There was a time
when the pangs of Prometheus seemed only pastime to mine, but all
things end; and now I get on as comfortably without a heart, as the
victims of vivisection--the frogs, and guinea pigs, and rabbits--do
without their brains."
"I do indeed grieve over the fatal step you contemplate; I grieve over
your unwomanliness in marrying a man whom you do not even pretend to
love; and some terrible penalty will avenge the outrage against
feminine nature. Some day your heart will stir in its cold torpor, and
then all Dante's visions of horror, will become your realities,
scuurging you down to despair."
"Because 'Farleigh Court' may lie dangerously close to 'Denzil Place'?
Be easy, Leo; the cold remains of my ossified affection will lie in as
decorous repose as the harmless ash heaps of some long buried damosel
of the era of Lars Porsenna, dug out of Vulci or Chiusi. To make a safe
and brilliant marriage is the acme of social success. What else does
the world to which I belong, offer me now?"
"There remains always, Alma, the alternative of listening to the
instinctive monitors God set to watch in every woman's nature; and we
have the precious and inalienable privilege of being true to ourselves.
Better mourn your 'bisc' than stoop to a lower substitute. Be loyal to
yourself, be true to your own heart."
"I know myself rather too intimately to offer a tribute of admiration
on the altar of ego; and I prefer to make the experiment of trying to
be true and loyal to some one else, with whose imperfections I am not
so well acquainted. When you meet your adorable 'bisc' in society, with
a wife hanging on his arm,--when as pater familias he convoys his flock
of small children who tread on your toes at the chrysanthemum shows,
what then? The world, my world, is generously and munificently lax, and
though the limits of respectable endurance may be as hard to find as
the 'fourth dimension of space', or the authenticity of the 'Book of
Jasher', still for decency's sake we submit there are limits of
decorum; certain proprietorial domains upon which we may not openly
poach; and mcum et tuum though moribund, is not yet numbered with
belief in the 'grail'. Female emancipation is not quite complete even
in America, and noblesse oblige! our code still reads: 'Zeus has
unquestioned right to Io; but woe betide Io when she suns her heart in
the smiles that belong to Hera!' Some women find exhilaration in the
effort to excel, by flying closest to the flame without singeing their
satin wings; by executing a pirouette on the extremest ledge of the
abyss, yet escape toppling in; female Blondins skipping across the
tight rope of Platonic friendship, stretched above the unmentionable.
You are shocked?"
"Indeed, I am pained. I can scarcely recognize the Alma of old."
"Wait one moment, I have the floor. In the days when I wept for
my--shall I say 'bisc'? for impersonality is hedged about with safety,
and the consolation prize had not yet been invited to come back from
Coventry, a funny trifle set me to thinking seriously of my sin of
covetousness. One summer at a certain fashionable resort, let us call
it villeggiatura of the Lepidoptera, the amusement programme had
reached the last act, and people yawned for something new, when 'sweet
charity' came to the rescue, and proposed an entertainment to raise
funds for enlarging an ecclesiastical 'Columbary' where aged, unsightly
and repentant doves might moult, and renew their plumage. Musical,
dramatic, poetic recitations, and tableaux vivants constituted the
method of collecting the money, and the selections would have made
Rabelais chuckle. We had the most flagitiously erotic passages
(rendered in costume) from opera and opera bouffe, living reproductions
of the tragic pose of Paolo and Francesca that would hare inspired
Cabanel anew; of 'Ginevra Da Siena,' of 'Vivien,'--a carnival of the
carnal! where nurseries were robbed to supply the mimic ballet, and
where bald-headed clergyman, and white-haired mothers in Israel clapped
and encored. One fair forsaken dame, whose indignant spouse was seeking
a divorce, came to the footlights in an artistic garment so decollete
that a man sitting behind me whispered to his friend: 'What pictures
does she suggest to you? "Phryne before the Judges"--or Long's
"Thisbe?" She languorously waved a floral fan of crimson carnations,
and recited with all of Siddons' grace and Rachel's fire selections
from a book of poems, that were so many dynamite bombs of vice
smothered in roses. Amid tumultuous applause, she gave as encore
something that contained a fragment of Feydeau, and its closing words
woke up my drowsy soul, like a clap of thunder: 'Ce que les poetes
appellent l'amour, et les moralistes l'adultere!' Leo, there is a moral
somnambulism more frightful than that which leads to midnight
promenades on the combs of roofs, and the borders of Goat Island; so I
wiped my tears away, and after that day, began to read the billet doux
and wear the flowers of my 'consolation prize'."
"You do not love him, and your marriage will degrade you in your own
estimation. Your bridal vows will be perjury, an insult to your God,
and a foul terrible wrong against the man who trusts your truthfulness.
According to our church, wedlock is a 'holy ordinance'; and to me an
unloving wife is unhallowed; is a blot on her sex, only a few degrees
removed from unmarried mothers. You know the difference between
friendship and love, and when you go to the altar, and give the former
in exchange for the latter, the base counterfeit for the true gold, you
are consciously and premeditatedly dishonest."
"Thanks, for your clearness of diction, your perspicuity which leaves
no cobweb of misty doubt wherewith to drape my shivering moral
deformity! To 'see ourselves as others see us' is as disappointing as
the result of plunging one's hand into the 'grab-bag', but at least it
brings the stimulating tingle of a new sensation. Suppose each knows
perfectly well that as regards the true gold, both are equally
bankrupt? There is a queer moral fungus called 'honesty among thieves',
and we both know that we never sang snatches from Offenbach to each
other, through pink 'bisc' lips. He loved quite desperately a mignonne
of a blonde, with heavenly blue eyes and cherubic yellow hair, who, not
knowing his expectations from a California uncle, jilted him for a rich
Cuban. Look you, Leo, because I cannot wear Kohinoor, must I disport
myself without any diamond necklace? Since he can never own 'La
Peregrina,' must he eschew pearl studs in his shield front? We
distinctly understand that we are not first prizes; but perhaps we may
be something better than total blanks in the lottery, even though we
quite realize the difference between love and friendship. Do you?
Portia should know every jot and tittle of the law, and all the subtle
shades of evidence, before she lifts her voice in court."
Alma pushed away her cushion, sat upright, and the slumbering fire
flashed up under her jet lashes.
"If I do, that knowledge which earlier or later comes to all women, is
certainly linked with the comforting consciousness that I can trust
myself to govern and protect myself, without being tied to a watch-dog,
whose baying would serve much the same purpose as that picture in
mosaic in the House of the Tragic Poet. I have a very sincere affection
for you, Alma, but the day on which you sell yourself in a loveless
marriage, will strain hard on the cable of esteem."
"Is it for this reason that you refuse to officiate as my bridesmaid?"
"Solely because I will neither witness nor participate in an act which
will give me great pain by lowering my estimate of your character."
Alma's long, supple, tapering fingers were outstretched, and taking
Leo's white dimpled hands, drew them caressingly to her face, pressing
a palm against each cheek.
"Your good opinion is so precious, I cannot afford to lose it. We
accept men's flattery and expect their compliments, because it is a
traditional homage that survives the chivalry that inspired it; but we
don't mistake chaff for wheat, and the purest, sweetest, noblest and
holiest friendship in life is that of a true, good woman. The perfume
is as different as the stale odor of a cigar, from the breath of the
honeysuckle that bleached all night under crystal dew, floats in at
your window like a message from heaven, I love you dearly, my pretty
Portia, hence I wince a trifle at your harsh ascription of cave canem
motives in my marriage. In the idyllic Arthurian days, the 'Lily Maid
of Astolot' made a touching picture, weeping and dying for the man who
rode away, marauding on kingly preserves; but this is the era of wise,
common sense 'Maud Mullers', and she and the Judge, mating as best they
can, lead peaceful lives in a wholesome atmosphere, and cause no
scandal by following 'affinities' across the lines of law; as some high
in literature, art, and society have done, trusting that the starred
mantle of genius would hide their moral leprosy. With all my faults, at
least I am honest; and when I bow my stiff neck under the yoke
connubial, I promise you I will keep step demurely and sedately. Do you
remember a sombre book we read while yachting, which contained this
brave confession of a woman, whose marriage made her historic? 'I
thought I had done with life. I knew I had now cause to be proud of
belonging to this man, and I was proud. At the same time I as little
feigned ardent love for him, as he demanded it from me.' Leo, you and I
represent different types. You are an eagle brooding in cold eternal
solitude upon the heights, rather than be wooed by valley hawks; I am
only a very tired wren, who missed a mate on my first Valentine season,
and seeing my plumage grows a rusty brown, I accept the overtures of
one similarly forlorn, and hope for serene domesticity under the
sheltering eaves of some quiet, cosey barn. You are a nobler bird, no
doubt; but trust me dear, I shall be the happier."
Leo withdrew her hands, and pushed back her chair, widening the space
that divided them.
"You disappoint me keenly. I thought you too brave to crouch before the
jeers hurled at 'old maidenism'. Moral cowardice is the last flaw I
expected in one of your fibre."
"Wait till you are thirty-three, and stand as a target at Society's
archery meeting. Yesterday Celeste was pale with horror when she showed
me two white hairs pulled from my 'bangs', and added, 'Helas races! and
powdered hair no more the style!' My dear girl--
"'True love, of course, is scarcely in society,
Unless in fancy dress, and masked like one of us--'"
still I really am very proud of my six feet two inches prospective
conjugal yoke-fellow; proud of his martial bearing, his brilliant
reputation, 'proud of his pride'; and I think I shall grow very fond of
him, because in a mild way I think he cares for me'; and we can make a
little Indian Summer for each other before the frosts of Winter fall
upon us. What else can I do with my life? Think of it. Papa will be
married soon, and while I don't propose to tear my hair and insult his
bride, nobody can be expected to reach such altitudes of
self-abnegation as to want a step-mother. Poor papa, I am sure I hope
he may be very happy, but it is superhuman to elect to live under the
same roof, and smile benignantly on his bliss. Rivers, too, has slipped
under the matrimonial noose, and I am absolutely thrown on my own
resources for companionship. What does society offer me? Haggard,
weazen old witch, bedizened in a painted mask; don't I know the yellow
teeth and bleared eyes behind the paste-board, and the sharp nails in
the claws hidden under undressed kid? Have not I gone around for years
on her gaudy wheel, like that patient, uncomplaining goat we saw
stepping on the broad spokes of the great wheel that churned the
butter, and pressed the cheese in that dairy, near Udine? The dizzying
circle, where one must step, step--keep time or be lost! In Winter,
balls, receptions, luncheons, teas, Germans, theatre parties, opera
suppers; a rush for the first glimpse of the last picture that emerges
from the custom-house; for a bouquet of the newest rose that took the
prize at the London Show. In season, coaching parties, tally ho! Then
fox hunting minus the fox, and later, boating and bathing and lawn
tennis!--and--always--everywhere heart-burnings, vapid formalities;
beaux setting belles at each other like terriers scrambling after a
mouse; mothers lying in wait, as wise cats watching to get their paws
on the first-class catch they know their pretty kittens cannot manage
successfully. Oh! Don't I know it all! I dare say my world is the very
best possible of its kind; and I am not cynical, but oh Lord! I am so
deadly tired of everything, and everybody."
"No wonder, unless you mercilessly calumniate it; but you have only
yourself to blame. You made social success your aim, fashionable life
your temple of worship, sham your only God. If you habitually drink
poppy juice, can you fail to be drowsy?"
"Oh bless you! I have been polytheistic as any other well-read pagan of
my day, and changed the heads and the labels of the fetiches on my
altar almost as often as my ball wardrobe. I aspired to 'culture' in
all the 'cults', and I improved diligently my opportunities. One year
the stylish craze was sesthetics, and I fought my way to the front of
the bedlamites raving about Sapphic types, 'Sibylla Palmifera' and
'Astarte Syriaca'; and I wore miraculously limp, draggled skirts, that
tangled about my feet tight as the robes of Burne Jones' 'Vivien.' Next
season the star of ceramics and bric-a-brac was in the ascendant, and I
ran the gamut of Satsuma, Kyoto, de la Robbia, Limoge and Gubbio; of
niello, and millchori glass, of Queen Anne brass and Japanese bronze;
while my snuff boxes and my 'symphony in fans' graced all the loan
exhibitions. Soon after, a celebrated scientist from England who had
bowled over all the pins set up by his predecessors, lectured in our
Bojotia; and fired with zeal for truth, I swept aside all my costly
idealistic rubbish into a 'doomed pyramid of the vanities', and swore
allegiance to the Positive, the 'Knowable', whose priests handled
hammers, spectroscopes, electric batteries--and who set up for me a
whole Pantheon of science fetiches. I bought a microscope and peered
into tissues, pollen cells, diatoms, ditch ooze; and pitied my clever
and very talented grandmother who died ignorant of the family secrets
revealed by 'totemism', ignorant of 'parthenogenesis' which proved so
conclusively the truth of her own firm conviction, that the faults she
deplored in her son's children were all inherited directly from her
daughter-in-law, whom she detested; ignorant of the fact that the sun
which she regarded as a dazzling yellow fire was by bolometric measures
shown to be in reality of a restful, and refreshing blue color. By the
time I was fully convinced that teleology was as dead as the Ptolemaic
theory, and that 'wings were not planned for flight, but that flight
has produced wings', hence that Haeckel's gospel of 'Dysteleology' or
purposelessness in Nature satisfactorily explained creation--a great
wave of oriental theosophy overflowed us; and a revival of Buddhism
invited me to seek Nirvana as the final beatitude, where--
"'We shall be
Part of the mighty universal whole,
And through all icons mix and mingle with the
Kosmic Soul!'"
Or to make matters clearer still:
"'Om, mani Padma, Om! the dewdrop slips
Into the shining sea!'"
Even a sponge can hold only so much, and I fell back--or shall I say
forward--in the path of progress to rest in the dimness of agnosticism.
Is it strange, Leo, that I am desperately tired; and willing to plant
my feet on the rock of matrimony, which will neither dissolve nor slip
away, and to which my vows will moor me firmly?"
"If you had clung to your Bible, and prayed more, you would not have
wasted so signally the years that might have brought you enduring
happiness. Forgive me, Alma, but you have lived solely for self."
"Yet now, when I propose to live solely for somebody else, you shake me
off, and repudiate me? Selfish you think? I dare say I am, but religion
now-a-day winks at that, nay fosters it. Each church is an octopus, and
the members are laboriously striving to disprove the Saviour's
admonition: 'Ye cannot serve God and mammon.' I am no worse than my
ritualistic sisters whom I meet and gossip with, under cover of the
organ muttering, and sometimes I wonder if after all we are any nearer
the kingdom of heaven that Christ preached, than the pagans whose
customs we retain under evangelical names. 'They sacrificed a white kid
to the propitious divinities, and a black kid to the unpropiticus.' Do
not we likewise? The church or one of its pensioners needs money; so
instead of denying ourselves some secular amusement, cutting short our
chablis, terrapin, pate de foie gras, gateau, Grec, Amontillado;
wearing less sealskin and sables, buying fewer pigeon-blood rubies,
absolutely mortifying the flesh in order to offer a contribution out of
our pockets to God, how ingeniously we devise schemes to extract the
largest possible amount of purely personal pleasure from the
expenditure of the sum, we call our contribution to charity? We build
chapels, and feed orphans, and clothe widows, and endow reformatories,
and establish beds in hospitals, how? By a devout, consecrating
self-denial which manifests itself in eating and drinking, in singing
and dancing, at kirmess, charity balls, amateur theatricals, garden
parties; where the cost of our XV. Siecle costume is quadruple the
price of the ticket that admits to our sacrifice of black and white
kids in the same sanctuary. We serve God with one hand, and we surely
serve with the other the Mammon of selfishness and vanity. We have
Lenten service, Lenten dietetics, Lenten costumes even; Lenten
progressive euchre, Lenten clubs; but where are the Lenten virtues,
where the genuine humility, charity, self-dedication of body and soul
to true holiness?"
"The church is a school. If pupils will not heed admonition, and defy
the efforts of instructors, is the institution responsible for the
failure in education? The eradication of selfishness is the mission of
the churches; and if we individually practised at home a genuine
self-denial for righteousness' sake, we should collectively show the
world fewer flaws for scoffing reprimand."
"The Shepherds are too timid to control their flocks. If they only had
the nerve to pick us up, turn our hearts inside out, show us the black
corners, and the ossifications, and call sin, sin, we should begin to
realize what despicable shams we are. Dr. Douglass, the Bishop, is the
only one I know who lays us on the dissecting table, and who does not
speak of 'human fallibility' when he means vice. He told us one day
that the Gospel required a line of demarcation between the godly and
the ungodly, between Christians and unbelievers; but that it has become
imaginary like the meridian and the equator; and that he very much
feared the strongest microscope in the laboratories could not find
where the boundary line ran between the World, the Flesh and the Devil,
and the Kingdom of God in our souls. I am sorry a distant State called
him to her Episcopal chair, for his cold steel is needed among us. Now
tell me, Leo, what you intend to do with your life?"
"Spend it for God and my fellow creatures; and enjoy all the pure
happiness I can appropriate without wronging others. I have so many
privileges granted me, that I ought to accomplish some good in this
world, as a thank offering."
"Take care you don't make a fetich of Jerusalem missions, Chinese
tracts, and Sheltering Arms; and lose your dear, sweet personality in a
goody-goody machine bigot. Forgive me, dear old girl, but sometimes I
fear a shadow has fallen in your sunshine."
"Sooner or later they fall into every life, yet mine will pass away I
feel assured. 'Pain, suffering, failure are as needful as ballast to a
ship, without which it does not draw enough water, becomes a plaything
for the winds and waves, travels no certain road, and easily
overturns.' If the gloomiest pessimist of this century can extract that
comfort, what may I not hope for my future? I am going to rebuild my
house at X----and when it is completed, I shall expect the privilege of
returning the hospitality you have so kindly shown me. I shall be very
busy for at least two years, and I am glad to know that Aunt Patty is
beginning to manifest some interest in my plans."
"Leo, may I ask something?"
"If you are quite sure you have the right to ask, and that I can have
no reason to decline answering."
"I can't bear that you should live and die without being a happy wife.
I don't want you to become a mere benevolent automaton set aside for
church work, and charities; getting solemn and thin, with patient
curves deepening around your mouth, and loneliness looking out of--
"'Eyes, meek as gentle Mercy's at the throne of heaven.'"
"To be a happy wife is the dream of womanhood, and if the day should
ever dawn when God gives me that crown of joy, I shall wear it gladly,
proudly, and feel that this world has yielded me its richest blessing;
but, Alma, to-day I know no man whom I could marry with the hope of
that perfect union which alone sanctions and hallows wedded love. I
must be all the world to my husband; and he--next to God--must be the
universe to me. There is Gen'l Haughton coming up the stairs, so I
considerately efface myself. Good-bye till luncheon."
As she glided away and disappeared behind the curtain leading into the
library, Alma looked after her, with very misty eyes, full of
tenderness.
"Brave, proud soul; deep, sorrowful heart. If she can't drown her star,
at least she will admit no lesser light. She will never swerve one iota
from her lofty standard, and some day, please God, she may yet wear her
coveted crown right royally. Governor Glenbeigh is worthy even of her,
but will his devotion win her at last?"