CHAPTER XXXV.

With the assembling of our friends in the Hall on that Christmas afternoon our story enters upon a new phase,—one, too, in which Mary Rolfe will figure more prominently than she has hitherto done. Of her friend Alice—Alice with the merry-glancing hazel eyes—the reader has, I trust, a tolerably clear conception. The picture we have of her is a pleasant one, I think,—a picture drawn not by me, but by herself. But from Mary—shy, reserved, and shrinking as she is—we can expect no such boon. Her portrait must be my work.

And first, I must repeat that she was Alice’s closest friend. When their acquaintance began, it would be hard to say. Their mothers before them were warm friends, and had been so fortunate as to have their homes, after marriage, separated only by one of Richmond’s peaceful streets; so that, even in long clothes, Alice and Mary, introduced by their respective nurses, had contracted such intimacy as might be gained by a reciprocal fumbling of each other’s noses and the poking of pink fingers into blinking eyes. Across this street, a few years later, these little crafts had made voyages innumerable; beneath its branching trees trundled their unsteady hoops, and along its not very crowded sidewalk had swung proudly, hand in hand, one bright October day, going to their first school. And ever since that day they have been going, so to speak, hand in hand. One circumstance, no doubt, that contributed much to binding their hearts together, was the fact that they were only daughters; so that each was, as it were the adopted sister of the other. But what, above all things, as I have suggested elsewhere, rendered a warm friendship between them both possible and lasting, was the singularly sharp contrasts presented by their characters. Two girls more radically unlike in disposition it would be hardly possible to find.

Now, among other traits of Mary’s character, totally lacking in Alice, was one of importance for my purposes, in that it was destined to make her play a considerable rôle amid the scenes to be pictured in the ensuing pages. It was a trait that goes by different names. According to some of her acquaintance,—kindred spirits they were,—Mary was full of enthusiasms, while to others of the hard-headed, practical type, she seemed sentimental. I, as umpire, must compromise by admitting that she was certainly what is called romantic. And I was about to bring in a little cheap philosophy to explain that this was due to the vast amount of novels and poetry with which she had stuffed her head, when I recalled the fact that some of the most clear-headed, energetic, and every way admirable women that I have known devoured every novel that they could lay their hands on. I, therefore, abandon the reflection, uncopyrighted, to such moralizers and others as have leisure to explain things of which they know nothing. But the fact was as I have stated it; Mary was a thoroughly romantic, or, if you will, sentimental young person, though I regret to have to say so. For it will lower her in your estimation, I fear, when I make known to you, by a few illustrations, what I mean by saying she was romantic.

It is more necessary for me to do this than would appear to the average contemporary reader. For it is more than likely that the expression, a romantic young female, will be totally unintelligible in your day, or, rather, that it will have an entirely different meaning from that which those words convey to us. You, too, of course, will not be without your romantic virgins,—that is to say, maidens of tender years, who, standing upon the hither brink of that dark and troublous sea called life, and watching the pitching and tossing of the numberless barks that have gone before,—who, seeing some struggling amid the breakers, others going to pieces on the reefs, still others drifting, dismantled and shattered, upon a shore already thick-strewn with wrecks,—yet love to dream of smooth and sunny paths across that pitiless waste of waters,—if—if only the Ideal Pilot may be found.

Yes, your girls will have their ideals,—but what ideals?

I cannot tell; but very different, doubtless, from ours. We have but to glance at here a page and there a page of the past records of the race, to feel quite sure that woman’s ideal man has varied much in the tide of time. Passing by prehistoric man, lest I wound the susceptibilities of such as claim that he never existed, and coming forward to the days of Homer, we must suppose that the sentimental daughters of the literary gentlemen of that day—the chiefs, to wit, who patronized the blind bard—for rhapsody divine bartering the prosaic but sustaining bacon—we must reckon it as probable that these young women yearned—if yearning were in vogue at that early period—yearned to be led from the parental roof by some Achilles of a youth, tall, broad-chested, agile as a panther, strong as a lion, with thews of steel, soul of adamant, eye of consuming fire. Juvenal, again, if we may pluck a leaf at random, tells us that, in his day, a sentimental married woman who would shriek at a mouse, let us say, was capable of braving the sea in a leaky old hulk, eloping with all that was left of a gladiator after twenty years’ hacking in the arena. And now, making a spring forward into the last quarter of the nineteenth century, we find the ideal of the upper ten dozen of New York society, for example, to be a nice young man who parts his hair and his name in the middle, leads in the “german”[[1]] and gets all his “things”[[2]] in London. [And this sufficed till but recently. Of late, however, as I read in the papers, the best society of New York has grown more exacting, and no one need now aspire to be looked upon as a lion—a knight without fear and without reproach—unless, after devoting for some years half his time and all his mind, as it were, to the art, he can “handle the reins” well enough to pass for a real stage-driver. The ’bus-drivers themselves, however, whimsically enough, are not held in half the estimation of their imitators and rivals (just as mock-turtle soup is deemed by many superior to the genuine decoction). They may actually be hired at two dollars a day, more or less, and seem positively glad to get that, being to all outward seeming entirely unconscious of the glamour attaching to their ennobling art.][[3]]

But to judge by the books they devoured with such eagerness, and the heroes they thought so captivating, the ideals, thirty years ago, of the Virginia young women—I may not speak for others—were very different from any of those above depicted. At that period the influence of Byron’s powerful genius was still plainly discernible in many works of fiction, especially those by female authors. Now, just ascertain cordials lose all their piquancy by being diluted, so the morbid creations of Byron’s unhealthy muse emerged, after passing through the alembic of female fancy, very pale heroes indeed; pale, in truth, in a double sense. For, at one time, I remember, a bloodless countenance was about all that was required to constitute a hero over whom all our girls went mad. The fellow was invariably dismally cold and impassive “in outward seeming;” but the authoress would contrive to suggest to the reader, by a hint here and there, that this coldness was in outward seeming only,—that this stern, haughty possessor of the broad, pallid brow (against which he ever and anon pressed his hand as though in pain) was the clandestine owner of feelings fit to be compared only to a stream of lava,—a cold crust above, concealing a fiery flood beneath; an iceberg, in a word, with a volcano in its bosom. There are no such icebergs, I believe, and it is equally certain that there are no such men; and I used to think, in those days, that if there were such, and one of this type were found hanging around a girl, the circumstance would afford her big brother’s boot legitimate occasion for an honorable activity. And I still think that this heroic treatment, as the faculty would term it, would find its justification, at least from a sanitary point of view. For it is to be remarked that in romances infested with this form of hero, there was, among the heroines, a veritable epidemic of brain-fever; whatever that may be. But the young ladies of my acquaintance, assigning jealousy as the source of these ferocious sentiments, could not be brought to my way of thinking; and of all of a certain bevy of girls with whom I associated, I believe that Mary Rolfe was furthest gone in her adoration of these august animals that dwelt apart.

Now, although a romantic temperament has its compensations,—compensations so varied and so valuable that, on the whole, it must be regarded as a blessing,—yet its dangers are as obvious. For of what avail is an Ideal without its Counterpart? Now, it is in searching for and finding this Counterpart that lies the danger to a girl of imaginative turn,—the danger, in plain English, of falling in love without a just and reasonable regard for the loaves and fishes of this prosaic world.

Now, even from the preliminary and partial sketch of the Don already made, you will see (though less clearly than when the drawings shall have been completed and the colors rubbed in) that he was a man likely to make a vivid impression on the imagination of a girl like Mary. I should be sorry, indeed, to have you suppose that such likelihood arose from any resemblance on his part to the type of novel-hero so fascinating to her imagination. And yet he appealed to that imagination most strongly. Of course the mystery surrounding him had much to do with this. Of late she had found herself continually asking herself who he could be. Was he a Virginian? Hardly, else some one would know him. Then, why had he come to Virginia? Was he an English nobleman, travelling incognito? Perhaps! But no! from several observations that he had let drop, he could scarcely be that. He was a gentleman, certainly; but then, what need has a gentleman of mystery? Had he committed any—? Impossible! And so, da capo,—who can he be? More than once she had caught herself stamping her little foot and muttering impatiently, “What is he to me?” But his image kept returning to her mind. The truth is, she was getting what the girls used to call, in those days, “interested,”—a word which means far more with women than with us men. “In love” is what we should call it; but that is an expression which women are chary of using, unless of men. According to their philosophy, it is tacitly assumed that, as it is not the proper thing for a woman to fall in love until she has been asked to, she never does; and I believe this to be true, as a rule. In fact, it seems to me that falling in love, as it is called, is, with women, a purely voluntary act. When entreated to lose their hearts they lose them, should it seem judicious, all things considered, so to do; if not, not. But as in Latin grammar, so in life: there are exceptions to all rules; and while, in nine cases out of ten, women are guided by judgment and reason, men impelled by passion and instinct, in their matrimonial ventures, yet there is, after all, a tenth case (all my readers are tenth cases if they will) where a woman, deluded by her imagination, wrecks her life on breakers that seemed, to others at least, too apparent to need a beacon. Nor are the weaker sisters most liable to blunders of this kind; for it seems to me that I have remarked that gifted women are most apt to throw themselves away on men entirely unworthy of them; led captive by the ideals their own hearts have fashioned; making gods of stocks and stones.

[1] Dance of the period.
[2] Clothes.
[3] If our fierce Bushwhacker could but witness the annual parade of our New York Coaching Club, he would be heartily ashamed of this venomous passage.—Ed.