Then she sat down at her desk and tried to write. She remembered the keen sense of pleasure she always experienced when she had finished a sonnet or scene of a play, but she was thinking now of how she would receive Stanhope. “I will give him my hand in a very quiet, friendly way that will show at once what my decision is. Nothing shall make me alter or give up my career.”
But it was very hard to give up everything, and she was very young and her friends thought her beautiful. Could there be no compromise? After all life need not be so dreary, and Paul Stanhope was distinctly the nicest and most eligible man she knew. Any number of girls liked him tremendously, and she sighed as she thought that she was keeping some girl from getting a very good husband indeed. This idea, though not wholly distasteful to her, brought her sharply back to her resolutions, and she picked up her Calderon. She had been reading it the day before and had left it turned down at the page. Suddenly a great pity for Calderon took possession of her. After all he was so dead now! Could he know how famous he was? Was he famous while he lived? Did his fame bring him love and happiness? She did not even know. Underneath the Calderon lay a copy of a poet’s works—a poet now famous and beloved, but who had died miserably poor and unknown. By the side of this volume lay the last number of a popular magazine. She had bought it because it contained a story by a man whom all the world was talking about. She had read in the morning’s paper that he had just been divorced from his wife. The sight of the book sickened her. She turned away and opened the case where she kept her Shakespeare, and took out a book at random. It was the sonnets. He, too, the greatest and wisest, had been wretchedly unhappy.
Suddenly the futility of all effort took hold of her. Suppose she should drudge her life away, never taste of happiness, die, and be only known as “Hungerford the dramatist.” She shuddered. In the years to come many people might not even know whether “Hungerford” had been a man or a woman. But she could never hold up her head again if she should relinquish her “career” now. What would her friends think? She felt that she had burned her ships behind her when she had published her tragedy, and that the eyes of her world were upon her.
She wished she were not so stylish and so distressingly well off in this world’s goods. Geniuses, she reflected, were always ugly and poor. Only lately had it come to be considered not infra dig. to grow rich off one’s brains. She would have liked to be an old-time ugly, poverty-stricken genius. As that could not be, however (her family might have objected to being dispossessed of a most generous income), the best thing she could do was to work on to the end. Better to die in harness, nobly striving after perfection, than to live to an ingloriously happy old age. She saw herself a melancholy woman, whose youth and beauty had fled before the exhausting demands of her genius. Fame had come, but too late. Her name was on every lip, but death awaited her. Nothing was left her but to choose her biographer and epitaph. She had long thought that the lines (adapted) from the “Adonais” would be very appropriate:
“Peace, peace! she is not dead, she doth not sleep;
She hath awakened from the dream of life!”
She considered them very sweet, and Shelley had always been one of her gods. There was a sort of poetical justice in the selection. She felt very sad and firm.
Just then someone tapped at the door, and a card was handed her. She trembled a little as she took it, but there was no change in her voice as she told the man to take Mr. Stanhope to the library and that she would be down immediately.
But she did not go at once. She stopped at her own door and went to the mirror, where she loosened her hair a little at the sides, and after looking critically at the effect, she went slowly down the stairs. At each step she repeated to herself “I must be firm. My career before everything.”
She was saying this over to herself for the twentieth time when she found, rather to her dismay, that she was at the door. Pushing aside the curtains, she extended her hand as she planned to do, but something in Stanhope’s expression as he came quickly toward her made her falter and let it drop to her side. The next thing she knew he had his arms around her and she was not repulsing him. He had not given her the least chance to explain, she thought indignantly. She would never have allowed it if he had given her a moment’s time! As for Stanhope, no idea of explanation entered his head. He saw no necessity for one.
After a while she told him that she did not love him, but he did not seem to believe her, and she could think of no way of proving it after what had happened. Then she assured him that she had always planned to spend her life in writing and study, and that it was impossible for her to marry him. But he declared that there were no end of writers in the world and absolutely but one woman who could be his wife, so that he did not think her decision just or warranted. And then he went over to her very tenderly and asked her if she really cared more for her musty books and a “brilliant career” (Stanhope was careful to use the word “career”) than she did for a man who loved her so devoutly that he would willingly lay down his life for her? At this Miss Hungerford cried a little, and he put her head on his shoulder while she thought about it.