White Lies [84]
more terrible conflict for Raynal, for honor and purity; and of late she had been battling, still against her own heart, for delicacy, for etiquette, things very dear to her, but not so great, holy, and sustaining as honor and charity that were her very household gods: and so, just when the motives of resistance were lowered, the length of the resistance began to wear her out.
For nothing is so hard to her sex as a long steady struggle. In matters physical, this is the thing the muscles of the fair cannot stand; in matters intellectual and moral, the long strain it is that beats them dead.
Do not look for a Bacona, a Newtona, a Handella, a Victoria Huga.
Some American ladies tell us education has stopped the growth of these.
No! mesdames. These are not in nature.
They can bubble letters in ten minutes that you could no more deliver to order in ten days than a river can play like a fountain. They can sparkle gems of stories: they can flash little diamonds of poems. The entire sex has never produced one opera nor one epic that mankind could tolerate: and why? these come by long, high- strung labor. But, weak as they are in the long run of everything but the affections (and there giants), they are all overpowering while their gallop lasts. Fragilla shall dance any two of you flat on the floor before four o'clock, and then dance on till the peep of day.
Only you trundle off to your business as usual, and could dance again the next night, and so on through countless ages.
She who danced you into nothing is in bed, a human jelly tipped with headache.
What did Josephine say to Rose one day? "I am tired of saying 'No! no! no! no! no!' forever and ever to him I love."
But this was not all. She was not free from self-reproach. Camille's faith in her had stood firm. Hers in him had not. She had wronged him, first by believing him false, then by marrying another. One day she asked his pardon for this. He replied that he had forgiven that; but would she be good enough to make him forget it?
"I wish I could."
"You can. Marry me: then your relation to that man will seem but a hideous dream. I shall be able to say, looking at you, my wife, 'I was faithful: I suffered something for her; I came home: she loved me still; the proof is, she was my wife within three months of my return.'"
When he said that to her in the Pleasaunce, if there had been a priest at hand--. In a word, Josephine longed to show him her love, yet wished not to shock her mother, nor offend her own sense of delicacy; but Camille cared for nothing but his love. To sacrifice love and happiness, even for a time, to etiquette, seemed to him to be trifling with the substance of great things for the shadow of petty things; and he said so: sometimes sadly, sometimes almost bitterly.
So Josephine was a beleagured fortress, attacked with one will, and defended by troops, one-third of which were hot on the side of the besiegers.
When singleness attacks division, you know the result beforehand. Why then should I spin words? I will not trace so ill-matched a contest step by step, sentence by sentence: let me rather hasten to relate the one peculiarity that arose out of this trite contest, where, under the names of Camille and Josephine, the two great sexes may be seen acting the whole world-wide distich,--
"It's a man's part to try, And a woman's to deny [for a while?]."
Finding her own resolutions oozing away, Josephine caught at another person.
She said to Camille before Rose,--
"Even if I could bring myself to snatch at happiness in this indelicate way--scarce a month after, oh!" And there ended the lady's sentence. In the absence of a legitimate full stop, she put one hand before her lovely face to hide it, and so no more. But some two minutes after she delivered the rest in the form and with the tone of a distinct remark, "No: my mother would never consent."
"Yes, she would if you could be brought to implore her as earnestly as I implore you."
"Now would she?" asked Josephine, turning
For nothing is so hard to her sex as a long steady struggle. In matters physical, this is the thing the muscles of the fair cannot stand; in matters intellectual and moral, the long strain it is that beats them dead.
Do not look for a Bacona, a Newtona, a Handella, a Victoria Huga.
Some American ladies tell us education has stopped the growth of these.
No! mesdames. These are not in nature.
They can bubble letters in ten minutes that you could no more deliver to order in ten days than a river can play like a fountain. They can sparkle gems of stories: they can flash little diamonds of poems. The entire sex has never produced one opera nor one epic that mankind could tolerate: and why? these come by long, high- strung labor. But, weak as they are in the long run of everything but the affections (and there giants), they are all overpowering while their gallop lasts. Fragilla shall dance any two of you flat on the floor before four o'clock, and then dance on till the peep of day.
Only you trundle off to your business as usual, and could dance again the next night, and so on through countless ages.
She who danced you into nothing is in bed, a human jelly tipped with headache.
What did Josephine say to Rose one day? "I am tired of saying 'No! no! no! no! no!' forever and ever to him I love."
But this was not all. She was not free from self-reproach. Camille's faith in her had stood firm. Hers in him had not. She had wronged him, first by believing him false, then by marrying another. One day she asked his pardon for this. He replied that he had forgiven that; but would she be good enough to make him forget it?
"I wish I could."
"You can. Marry me: then your relation to that man will seem but a hideous dream. I shall be able to say, looking at you, my wife, 'I was faithful: I suffered something for her; I came home: she loved me still; the proof is, she was my wife within three months of my return.'"
When he said that to her in the Pleasaunce, if there had been a priest at hand--. In a word, Josephine longed to show him her love, yet wished not to shock her mother, nor offend her own sense of delicacy; but Camille cared for nothing but his love. To sacrifice love and happiness, even for a time, to etiquette, seemed to him to be trifling with the substance of great things for the shadow of petty things; and he said so: sometimes sadly, sometimes almost bitterly.
So Josephine was a beleagured fortress, attacked with one will, and defended by troops, one-third of which were hot on the side of the besiegers.
When singleness attacks division, you know the result beforehand. Why then should I spin words? I will not trace so ill-matched a contest step by step, sentence by sentence: let me rather hasten to relate the one peculiarity that arose out of this trite contest, where, under the names of Camille and Josephine, the two great sexes may be seen acting the whole world-wide distich,--
"It's a man's part to try, And a woman's to deny [for a while?]."
Finding her own resolutions oozing away, Josephine caught at another person.
She said to Camille before Rose,--
"Even if I could bring myself to snatch at happiness in this indelicate way--scarce a month after, oh!" And there ended the lady's sentence. In the absence of a legitimate full stop, she put one hand before her lovely face to hide it, and so no more. But some two minutes after she delivered the rest in the form and with the tone of a distinct remark, "No: my mother would never consent."
"Yes, she would if you could be brought to implore her as earnestly as I implore you."
"Now would she?" asked Josephine, turning