A TALK WITH ELODIA.
"It behoveth us also to consider the nature of him that
offendeth."--SENECA.
The longer I delayed my visit to Caskia, the more difficult it became
for me to tear myself away from Thursia. You may guess the lodestar
that held me back. It was as if I were attached to Elodia by an
invisible chain which, alas! in no way hindered her free movements,
because she was unconscious of its existence. Sometimes she treated me
with a charmingly frank _camaraderie_, and at other times her manner
was simply, almost coldly, courteous,--which I very well knew to be
due to the fact that she was more than usually absorbed in her
business or official affairs; she was never cold for a purpose, any
more than she was fascinating for a purpose. She was singularly
sincere, affecting neither smiles nor frowns, neither affability nor
severity, from remote or calculating motives. In brief, she did not
employ her feminine graces, her sexpower, as speculating capital in
social commerce. The social conditions in Thursia do not demand that
women shall pose in a conciliatory attitude toward men--upon whose
favor their dearest privileges hang. Marriage not being an economic
necessity with them, they are released from certain sordid motives
which often actuate women in our world in their frantic efforts to
avert the appalling catastrophe of missing a husband; and they are at
liberty to operate their matrimonial campaigns upon other grounds. I
do not say higher grounds, because that I do not know. I only know
that one base factor in the marriage problem,--the ignoble scheming to
secure the means of living, as represented in a husband,--is
eliminated, and the spirit of woman is that much more free.
We men have a feeling that we are liable at any time to be entrapped
into matrimony by a mask of cunning and deceit, which heredity and
long practice enable women to use with such amazing skill that few can
escape it. We expect to be caught with chaff, like fractious colts
coquetting with the halter and secretly not unwilling to be caught.
Another thing: woman's freedom to propose--which struck me as
monstrous--takes away the reproach of her remaining single; the
supposition being, as in the case of a bachelor, that it is a matter
of choice with her. It saves her the dread of having it said that she
has never had an opportunity to marry.
Courtship in Thursia may lack some of the tantalizing uncertainties
which give it zest with us, but marriage also is robbed of many doubts
and misgivings. Still I could not accustom myself with any feeling of
comfort to the situation there,--the idea of masculine pre-eminence
and womanly dependence being too thoroughly ingrained in my nature.
Elodia, of course, did many things and held many opinions of which I
did not approve. But I believed in her innate nobility, and
attributed her defects to a pernicious civilization and a government
which did not exercise its paternal right to cherish, and restrain,
and protect, the weaker sex, as they should be cherished, and
restrained, and protected. And how charming and how reliable she was,
in spite of her defects! She had an atomic weight upon which you could
depend as upon any other known quantity. Her presence was a stimulus
that quickened the faculties and intensified the emotions. At least I
may speak for myself; she awoke new feelings and aroused new powers
within me.
Her life had made her practical but not prosaic. She had imagination
and poetic feeling; there were times when her beautiful countenance
was touched with the grandeur of lofty thought, and again with the
shifting lights of a playful humor, or the flashings of a keen but
kindly wit. She had a laugh that mellowed the heart, as if she took
you into her confidence. It is a mark of extreme favor when your
superior, or a beautiful woman, admits you to the intimacy of a
cordial laugh! Even her smiles, which I used to lie in wait for and
often tried to provoke, were not the mere froth of a light and
careless temperament; they had a significance like speech. Though she
was so busy, and though she knew so well how to make the moments
count, she could be idle when she chose, deliciously, luxuriously
idle,--like one who will not fritter away his pence, but upon occasion
spends his guineas handsomely. At the dinner hour she always gave us
of her best. Her varied life supplied her with much material for
conversation,--nothing worth noticing ever escaped her, in the life
and conduct of people about her. She was fond of anecdote, and could
garnish the simplest story with an exquisite grace.
Upon one of her idle days,--a day when Severnius happened not to be at
home,--she took up her parasol in the hall after we had had luncheon,
and gave me a glance which said, "Come with me if you like," and we
went out and strolled through the grounds together. Her manner had not
a touch of coquetry; I might have been simply another woman, she
might have been simply another man. But I was so stupid as to essay
little gallantries, such as had been, in fact, a part of my youthful
education; she either did not observe them or ignored them, I could
not tell which. Once I put out my hand to assist her over a
ridiculously narrow streamlet, and she paid no heed to the gesture,
but reefed her skirts, or draperies, with her own unoccupied hand and
stepped lightly across. Again, when we were about to ascend an abrupt
hill, I courteously offered her my arm.
"O, no, I thank you!" she said; "I have two, which balance me very
well when I climb."
"You are a strange woman," I exclaimed with a blush.
"Am I?" she said, lifting her brows. "Well, I suppose--or rather you
suppose--that I am the product of my ancestry and my training."
"You are, in some respects," I assented; and then I added, "I have
often tried to fancy what effect our civilization would have had upon
you."
"What effect do you think it would have had?" she asked, with quite an
unusual--I might say earthly--curiosity.
"I dare not tell you," I replied, thrilling with the felicity of a
talk so personal,--the first I had ever had with her.
"Why not?" she demanded, with a side glance at me from under her
gold-fringed shade.
"It would be taking too great a liberty."
"But if I pardon that?" There was an archness in her smile which was
altogether womanly. What a grand opportunity, I thought, for saying
some of the things I had so often wanted to say to her! but I
hesitated, turning hot and then cold.
"Really," I said, "I cannot. I should flatter you, and you would not
like that."
For the first time, I saw her face crimson to the temples.
"That would be very bad taste," she replied; "flattery being the last
resort--when it is found that there is nothing in one to compliment.
Silence is better; you have commendable tact."
"Pardon my stupid blunder!" I cried; "you cannot think I meant that!
Flattery is exaggerated, absurd, unmeaning praise, and no praise, the
highest, the best, could do you justice, could--"
She broke in with a disdainful laugh:
"A woman can always compel a pretty speech from a man, you see,--even
in Mars!"
"You did not compel it," I rejoined earnestly, "if I but dared,--if
you would allow me to tell you what I think of you, how highly I
regard--"
She made a gesture which cut short my eloquence, and we walked on in
silence.
Whenever there has been a disturbance in the moral atmosphere, there
is nothing like silence to restore the equilibrium. I, watching
furtively, saw the slight cloud pass from her face, leaving the
intelligent serenity it usually wore. But still she did not speak.
However, there was nothing ominous in that, she was never troubled
with an uneasy desire to keep conversation going.
On top of the hill there were benches, and we sat down. It was one of
those still afternoons in summer when nature seems to be taking a
siesta. Overhead it was like the heart of a rose. The soft, white,
cottony clouds we often see suspended in our azure ether, floated--as
soft, as white, as fleecy--in the pink skies of Mars.
Elodia closed her parasol and laid it across her lap and leaned her
head back against the tree in whose shade we were. It was an acute
pleasure, a rapture indeed, to sit so near to her and alone with her,
out of hearing of all the world. But she was calmly unconscious, her
gaze wandering dreamily through half-shut lids over the wide
landscape, which included forests and fields and meadows, and many
windings of the river, for we had a high point of observation.
I presently broke the silence with a bold, perhaps an inexcusable
question,
"Elodia, do you intend ever to marry?"
It was a kind of challenge, and I held myself rigid, waiting for her
answer, which did not come immediately. She turned her eyes toward me
slowly without moving her head, and our glances met and gradually
retreated, as two opposing forces might meet and retreat, neither
conquering, neither vanquished. Hers went back into space, and she
replied at last as if to space,--as if the question had come, not from
me alone, but from all the voices that urge to matrimony.
"Why should I marry?"
"Because you are a woman," I answered promptly.
"Ah!" her lip curled with a faint smile, "your reason is very general,
but why limit it at all, why not say because I am one of a pair which
should be joined together?"
The question was not cynical, but serious; I scrutinized her face
closely to make sure of that before answering.
"I know," I replied, "that here in Mars there is held to be no
difference in the nature and requirements of the sexes, but it is a
false hypothesis, there is a difference,--a vast difference! all my
knowledge of humanity, my experience and observation, prove it."
"Prove it to you, no doubt," she returned, "but not to me, because my
experience and observation have been the reverse of yours. Will you
kindly tell me," she added, "why you think I should wish to marry any
more than a man,--or what reasons can be urged upon a woman more than
upon a man?"
An overpowering sense of helplessness fell upon me,--as when one has
reached the limits of another's understanding and is unable to clear
the ground for further argument.
"O, Elodia! I cannot talk to you," I replied. "It is true, as you say,
that our conclusions are based upon diverse premises; we are so wide
apart in our views on this subject that what I would say must seem to
you the merest cant and sentiment."
"I think not; you are an honest man," she rejoined with an encouraging
smile, "and I am greatly interested in your philosophy of marriage."
I acknowledged her compliment.
"Well," I began desperately, letting the words tumble out as they
would, "it is woman's nature, as I understand it, to care a great deal
about being loved,--loved wholly and entirely by one man who is worthy
of her love, and to be united to him in the sacred bonds of marriage.
To have a husband, children; to assume the sweet obligations of
family ties, and to gather to herself the tenderest and purest
affections humanity can know, is surely, indisputably, the best, the
highest, noblest, province of woman."
"And not of man?"
"These things mean the same to men, of course," I replied, "though in
lesser degree. It is man's office--with us--to buffet with the world,
to wrest the means of livelihood, of comfort, luxury, from the
grudging hand of fortune. It is the highest grace of woman that she
accepts these things at his hands, she honors him in accepting, as he
honors her in bestowing."
I was aware that I was indulging in platitudes, but the platitudes of
Earth are novelties in Mars.
Her eyes took a long leap from mine to the vague horizon line. "It is
very strange," she said, "this distinction you make, I cannot
understand it at all. It seems to me that this love we are talking
about is simply one of the strong instincts implanted in our common
nature. It is an essential of our being. Marriage is not, it is a
social institution; and just why it is incumbent upon one sex more
than upon the other, or why it is more desirable for one sex than the
other, is inconceivable to me. If either a man, or a woman, desires
the ties you speak of, or if one has the vanity to wish to found a
respectable family, then, of course, marriage is a necessity,--made so
by our social and political laws. It is a luxury we may have if we pay
the price."
I was shocked at this cold-blooded reasoning, and cried, "O, how can a
woman say that! have you no tenderness, Elodia? no heart-need of these
ties and affections,--which I have always been taught are so precious
to woman?"
She shrugged her shoulders, and, leaning forward a little, clasped her
hands about her knees.
"Let us not make it personal," she said; "I admitted, that these
things belong to our common nature, and I do not of course except
myself. But I repeat that marriage is a convention, and--I am not
conventional."
"As to that," I retorted, "all the things that pertain to
civilization, all the steps which have ever been taken in the
direction of progress, are conventions: our clothing, our houses, our
religions, arts, our good manners. And we are bound to accept every
'convention' that makes for the betterment of society, as though it
were a revelation from God."
I confess that this thought was the fruit of my brief intercourse with
the Caskians, who hold that there is a divine power continually
operating upon human consciousness,--not disclosing miracles, but
enlarging and perfecting human perceptions. I was thinking of this
when Elodia suddenly put the question to me:
"Are you married?"
"No, I am not," I replied. The inquiry was not agreeable to me; it
implied that she had been hitherto altogether too indifferent as to my
"eligibility,"--never having concerned herself to ascertain the fact
before.
"Well, you are perhaps older than I am," she said, "and you have
doubtless had amours?"
I was as much astounded by the frankness of this inquiry as you can
be, and blushed like a girl. She withdrew her eyes from my face with a
faint smile and covered the question by another:
"You intend to marry, I suppose?"
"I do, certainly," I replied, the resolution crystallizing on the
instant.
She drew a long sigh. "Well, I do not, I am so comfortable as I am."
She patted the ground with her slipper toe. "I do not wish to impose
new conditions upon myself. I simply accept my life as it comes to me.
Why should I voluntarily burden myself with a family, and all the
possible cares and sorrows which attend the marriage state! If I cast
a prophetic eye into the future, what am I likely to see?--Let us say,
a lovely daughter dying of some frightful malady; an idolized son
squandering my wealth and going to ruin; a husband in whom I no longer
delight, but to whom I am bound by a hundred intricate ties impossible
to sever. I think I am not prepared to take the future on trust to so
great an extent! Why should the free wish for fetters? Affection and
sympathy are good things, indispensable things in fact,--but I find
them in my friends. And for this other matter: this need of love,
passion, sentiment,-which is peculiarly ephemeral in its impulses,
notwithstanding that it has such an insistent vitality in the human
heart,--may be satisfied without entailing such tremendous
responsibilities."
I looked at her aghast; did she know what she was saying; did she mean
what her words implied?
"You wrong yourself, Elodia," said I; "those are the sentiments, the
arguments, of a selfish person, of a mean and cowardly spirit. And you
have none of those attributes; you are strong, courageous, generous--"
"You mistake me," she interrupted, "I am entirely selfish; I do not
wish to disturb my present agreeable pose. Tell me, what is it that
usually prompts people to marry?"
"Why, love, of course," I answered.
"Well, you are liable to fall in love with my maid--"
"Not after having seen her mistress!" I ejaculated.
"If she happens to possess a face or figure that draws your masculine
eye," she went on, the rising color in her cheek responding to my
audacious compliment; "though there may be nothing in common between
you, socially, intellectually, or spiritually. What would be the
result of such a marriage, based upon simple sex-love?"
I had known many such marriages, and was familiar with the results,
but I did not answer. We tacitly dropped the subject, and our two
minds wandered away as they would, on separate currents.
She was the first to break this second silence.
"I can conceive of a marriage," she said, "which would not become
burdensome, any more than our best friendships become burdensome.
Beside the attraction on the physical plane--which I believe is very
necessary--there should exist all the higher affinities. I should want
my husband to be my most delightful companion, able to keep my liking
and to command my respect and confidence as I should hope to his. But
I fear that is ideal."
"The ideal is only the highest real," I answered, "the ideal is always
possible."
"Remotely!" she said with a laugh. "The chances are many against it."
"But even if one were to fall short a little in respect to husband or
wife, I have often observed that there are compensations springing out
of the relation, in other ways," I returned.
"You mean children? O, yes, that is true, when all goes well. I will
tell you," she added, her voice dropping to the tone one instantly
recognizes as confidential, "that I am educating several children in
some of our best schools, and that I mean to provide for them with
sufficient liberality when they come of age. So, you see, I have
thrown hostages to fortune and shall probably reap a harvest of
gratitude,--in place of filial affection."
She laughed with a touch of mockery.
I suppose every one is familiar with the experience of having
things--facts, bits of knowledge,--"come" to him, as we say. Something
came to me, and froze the marrow in my bones.
"Elodia," I ventured, "you asked me a very plain question a moment
ago, will you forgive me if I ask you the same,--have you had amours?"
The expression of her face changed slightly, which might have been due
to the expression of mine.
"We have perhaps grown too frank with each other," she said, "but you
are a being from another world, and that must excuse us,--shall it?"
I bowed, unable to speak.
"One of the children I spoke of, a little girl of six, is my own
natural child."
She made this extraordinary confession with her glance fixed steadily
upon mine.
I am a man of considerable nerve, but for a moment the world was dark
to me and I had the sensation of one falling from a great height. And
then suddenly relief came to me in the thought, She is not to be
judged by the standards that measure morality in my country! When I
could command my voice again I asked:
"Does this little one know that she is your child,--does any one else
know?"
"Certainly not," she answered in a tone of surprise, and then with an
ironical smile, "I have treated you to an exceptional confidence. It
is a matter of etiquette with us to keep these things hidden."
As I made no response she added:
"Is it a new thing to you for a parent not to acknowledge illegitimate
children?"
"Even the lowest class of mothers we have on Earth do not often
abandon their offspring," I replied.
"Neither do they here," she said. "The lowest class have nothing to
gain and nothing to lose, and consequently there is no necessity that
they should sacrifice their natural affections. In this respect, the
lower classes are better off than we aristocrats."
"You beg the question," I returned; "you know what I mean! I should
not have thought that you, Elodia, could ever be moved by such
unworthy considerations--that you would ever fear the world's
opinions! you who profess manly qualities, the noblest of which is
courage!"
"Am I to understand by that," she said, "that men on your planet
acknowledge their illegitimate progeny, and allow them the privileges
of honored sons and daughters?"
Pushed to this extremity, I could recall but a single instance,--but
one man whose courage and generosity, in a case of the kind under
discussion, had risen to the level of his crime. I related to her the
story of his splendid and prolonged life, with its one blot of early
sin, and its grace of practical repentance. And upon the other hand, I
told her of the one distinguished modern woman, who has had the
hardihood to face the world with her offenses in her hands, as one
might say.
"Are you not rather unjust to the woman?" she asked. "You speak of the
man's acknowledgment of his sin as something fine, and you seem to
regard hers as simply impudent."
"Because of the vast difference between the moral attitude of the
two," I rejoined. "He confessed his error and took his punishment with
humility; she slaps society in the face, and tries to make her genius
glorify her misdeeds."
"Possibly society is to blame for that, by setting her at bay. If I
have got the right idea about your society, it is as unrelenting to
the one sex as it is indulgent to the other. Doubtless it was ready
with open arms to receive back the offending, repentant man, but would
it not have set its foot upon the woman's neck if she had given it the
chance, if she had knelt in humility as he did? A tree bears fruit
after its kind; so does a code of morals. Gentleness and forgiveness
breed repentance and reformation, and harshness begets defiance." She
added with a laugh, "What a spectacle your civilization would present
if all the women who have sinned had the genius and the spirit of a
Bernhardt!"
"Or all the men had the magnanimity of a Franklin," I retorted.
"True!" she said, and after a moment she continued, "I am not so great
as the one, nor have I the 'effrontery' of the other. But it is not so
much that I lack courage; it is rather, perhaps, a delicate
consideration for, and concession to, the good order of society."
I regarded her with amazement, and she smiled.
"Really, it is true," she said. "I believe in social order and I pay
respect to it--"
"By concealing your own transgressions," I interpolated.
"Well, why not? Suppose I and my cult--a very large class of eminently
respectable sinners!--should openly trample upon this time-honored
convention; the result would eventually be, no doubt, a moral anarchy.
We have a very clear sense of our responsibility to the masses. We
make the laws for their government, and we allow ourselves to seem to
be governed by them also,--so that they may believe in them. We build
churches and pay pew rent, though we do not much believe in the
religious dogmas. And we leave off wine when we entertain temperance
people."
"But why do you do these things?" I asked; "to what end?"
"Simply for the preservation of good order and decency. You must know
that the pleasant vices of an elegant person are brutalities in the
uncultured. The masses have no tact or delicacy, they do not
comprehend shades, and refinements of morals and manners. They can
understand exoteric but not esoteric philosophy. We have really two
codes of laws."
"I think it would be far better for the masses--whom you so highly
respect!--" I said, "if you were to throw off your masks and stand out
before them just as you are. Let moral anarchy come if it must, and
the evil be consumed in its own flame; out of its ashes the ph[oe]nix
always rises again, a nobler bird."
"How picturesque!" she exclaimed; "do you know, I think your language
must be rich in imagery. I should like to learn it."
I did not like the flippancy of this speech, and made no reply.
After a brief pause she added, "There is truth in what you say, a ball
must strike hard before it can rebound. Society must be fearfully
outraged before it turns upon the offender, if he be a person of
consequence. But you cannot expect the offender to do his worst, to
dash himself to pieces, in order that a better state of morals may be
built upon his ruin. We have not yet risen to such sublimity of
devotion and self-sacrifice. I think the fault and the remedy both,
lie more with the good people,--the people who make a principle of
moral conduct. They allow us to cajole them into silence, they wink at
our misdeeds. They know what we are up to, but they conceal the
knowledge,--heaven knows why!--as carefully as we do our vices.
Contenting themselves with breaking out in general denunciations which
nobody accepts as personal rebuke."
This was such a familiar picture that for a moment I fancied myself
upon the Earth again. And I thought, what a difficult position the
good have to maintain everywhere, for having accepted the championship
of a cause whose standards are the highest and best! We expect them to
be wise, tender, strong, just, stern, merciful, charitable,
unyielding, forgiving, sinless, fearless.
"Elodia," I said presently, "you can hardly understand what a shock
this--this conversation has been to me. I started out with saying that
I had often tried to fancy what our civilization might have done for
you. I see more clearly now. You are the victim of the harshest and
cruelest assumption that has ever been upheld concerning woman,--that
her nature is no finer, holier than man's. I have reverenced womanhood
all my life as the highest and purest thing under heaven, and I will,
I must, hold fast to that faith, to that rock on which the best
traditions of our Earth are founded."
"Do your women realize what they have got to live up to?" she asked
ironically.
"There are things in men which offset their virtues," I returned, in
justice to my own sex. "Where men are strong, women are gentle, where
women are faithful, men are brave, and so on."
"How charming to have the one nature dovetail into the other so
neatly!" she exclaimed. "I seem to see a vision, shall I tell it to
you,--a vision of your Earth? In the Beginning, you know that is the
way in which all our traditions start out, there was a great heap of
Qualities stacked in a pyramid upon the Earth. And the human creatures
were requested to step up and help themselves to such as suited their
tastes. There was a great scramble, and your sex, having some
advantages in the way of muscle and limb,--and not having yet acquired
the arts of courtesy and gallantry for which you are now so
distinguished,--pressed forward and took first choice. Naturally you
selected the things which were agreeable to possess in themselves, and
the exercise of which would most redound to your glory; such virtues
as chastity, temperance, patience, modesty, piety, and some minor
graces, were thrust aside and eventually forced upon the weaker
sex,--since it was necessary that all the Qualities should be used in
order to make a complete Human Nature. Is not that a pretty fable?"
She arose and shook out her draperies and spread her parasol. There
were crimson spots in her cheeks, I felt that I had angered her,--and
on the other hand, she had outraged my finest feelings. But we were
both capable of self-government.
"It must be near dinner time," she said, quietly.
I walked along by her side in silence.
As we again crossed the brooklet, she stooped and picked a long raceme
of small white, delicately odorous flowers, and together we analyzed
them, and I recognized them as belonging to our family of _convallaria
majalis_. This led to a discussion of comparative botany on the two
planets,--a safe, neutral topic. In outward appearance our mutual
attitude was unchanged. Inwardly, there had been to me something like
the moral upheaval of the universe. For the first time I had
melancholy symptoms of nostalgia, and passionately regretted that I
had ever exchanged the Earth for Mars.
Severnius had returned. After dinner he invited me out onto the
veranda to smoke a cigar,--he was very particular not to fill the
house with tobacco smoke. Elodia, he said, did not like the odor. I
wondered whether he took such pains out of consideration for her, or
whether he simply dreaded her power to retaliate with her obnoxious
vapor. The latter supposition, however, I immediately repudiated as
being unjust to him; he was the gentlest and sweetest of men.
My mind was so full of the subject Elodia and I had discussed that I
could not forbear repeating my old question to him:
"Tell me, my friend," I entreated, "do you in your inmost soul believe
that men and women have one common nature,--that women are no better
at all than men, and that men may, if they will, be as pure as--well
as women ought to be?"
Severnius smiled. "If you cannot find an answer to your first question
here in Paleveria, I think you may in any of the savage countries,
where I am quite positive the women exhibit no finer qualities than
their lords. And for a very conclusive reply to your second
question,--go to Caskia!"
"Does the same idea of equality, or likeness rather, exist in Caskia
that prevails here?" I asked.
"O, yes," said he, "but their plane of life is so much higher. I
cannot but believe in the equality" he added, "bad as things are with
us. We hope that we are progressing onward and upward; all our
teaching and preaching tend toward that, as you may find in our
churches and schools, and in our literature. I am so much of an
optimist as to believe that we are getting better and better all the
time. One evidence is that there is less of shamelessness than there
used to be with respect to some of the grossest offences against
decency. People do not now glory in their vices, they hide them."
"Then you approve of concealment!" I exclaimed.
"It is better than open effrontery, it shows that the moral power in
society is the stronger; that it is making the way of the transgressor
hard, driving him into dark corners."
I contrasted this in my mind with Elodia's theory on the same subject.
The two differed, but there was a certain harmony after all.
Severnius added, apropos of what had gone before, "It does not seem
fair to me that one half of humanity should hang upon the skirts of
the other half; it is better that we should go hand in hand, even
though our progress is slow."
"But that cannot be," I returned; "there are always some that must
bear the burden while others drag behind."
"O, certainly; that is quite natural and right," he assented. "The
strong should help the weak. What I mean is that we should not throw
the burden upon any particular class, or allow to any particular class
special indulgences. That--pardon me!--is the fault I find with your
civilization; you make your women the chancellors of virtue, and claim
for your sex the privilege of being virtuous or not, as you choose."
He smiled as he added, "Do you know, your loyalty and tender devotion
to individual women, and your antagonistic attitude toward women in
general--on the moral plane--presents the most singular contrast to my
mind!"
"No doubt," I said; "it is a standing joke with us. We are better in
the sample than in the whole piece. As individuals, we are woman's
devoted slaves, and lovers, and worshipers; as a political body, we
are her masters, from whom she wins grudging concessions; as a social
factor, we refuse her dictation."
I was not in a mood to discuss the matter further. I was sick at heart
and angry,--not so much with Elodia as with the conditions that had
made her what she was, a woman perfect in every other respect, but
devoid of the one supreme thing,--the sense of virtue. She was now to
me simply a splendid ruin, a temple without holiness. I went up to my
room and spent the night plunged in the deepest sadness I had ever
known. When one is suffering an insupportable agony, he catches at the
flimsiest delusions for momentary relief. He says to himself, "My
friend is not dead!" "My beloved is not false!" So I tried to cheat
myself. I argued, "Why, this is only a matter of education with me,
surely; how many women, with finer instincts than mine, have loved and
married men of exactly the same stamp as Elodia!" But I put away the
thought with a shudder, feeling that it would be a far more dreadful
thing to relax my principles and to renounce my faith in woman's
purity than to sacrifice my love. The tempter came in another form.
Suppose she should repent? But my soul revolted. No, no; Jesus might
pardon a Magdalene, but I could not. Elodia was dead; Elodia had never
been! That night I buried her; I said I would never look upon her face
again. But the morning brought resurrection. How hard a thing it is to
destroy love!