The Day of His Youth

								

you want this emotion you call love translated to you by a woman who
has studied her kind as you study the birds? You say it is, it must be
(O, most pitiful cry of the finite after infinity!) eternal. It is
nothing of the sort. It is prosaically and sordidly of this earth,
especially in the case of men. I grant you that many women do
subordinate their lives to what they call a great passion (poor Amelia
crying over George's picture! O sad, true travesty of the worship we so
exalt!), but it is because they have fewer interests, and because
tradition has glorified feminine faithfulness and society built its
temples on woman's chastity. But men! I know them. Do not expect me to
own, for a moment, that any man is going to worship any woman all his
life long with the fervor he shows in pursuing the game. Many are kind,
some are tender, even to gray hairs and the grave; but that particular
form of idolatry which you offer me like a jewel in a case,--it turns
to paste in less than ten years, and I will have none of it. But why,
you ask, set myself outside the pale of human kind? It is a joy, though
fleeting, and if others prize it, even briefly, why not I? I know
myself too well. I am, in many ways, a hard woman. My heart is bedded
in a crust of flint, and no daw shall peck at it. But if that armor
were worn away, if I did sink my traditions to become all-womanly, if I
pinned life and soul and faith and breath to a man--O, I shudder to
think of seeing that morning-glow fade into the light of common day. It
is such women as I who break their hearts; not your sentimental miss
who goes puling about, prating love and religion, and confiding in her
pastor. I have laughed long at what I call sentiment, but I am more
sentimental than the sentimentalist. I own the awful power of one soul
over its opposite; but it is a power to which I will not give way. Now,
in plain words, what should be the outcome of love? Marriage. And
marriage; what of that? It is a welding of two souls, say you, before
an altar where a sacred fire is ever after to be kept burning.
According to my idea, gathered from observation, it is a business
partnership gilded by certain pretty fictions which no one pretends to
observe. For six months, a year, five years, the husband worships his
wife with an ideality which ought to turn beggar-maids to queens and
queens to angels. Then, plainly, he gets used to her. She is a very
good woman, but her like has been seen before, and may be again. His
nature has a dozen sides to be satisfied; he is ambitious, he loves
art, or money, or his dirty fellow-men. All very well, you say; without
such bent, souls would be cramped and torpid. Ah, but meantime the
altar-fire dies down! If she loves him truly,--



    "And if, ah woe! she loves alone,"
she tends it with her poor, weak hands; but no longer are the
ministrants two. The little observances of love are forgotten, or they
degenerate into a meaningless form more pitiful than silence. You