Too Old for Dolls: A Novel

by Anthony M. Ludovici

To-day it seemed to her, you might choose the cleanly-bred, healthy, upright, jaunty athlete, and sigh in vain for a companion who could either sob or rejoice with you over the glory of a sonnet, a picture, or a statue; or else you might choose the slightly effete and partly neurotic poet or artist, and languish unconsoled, away from the joys of the fine, clean, stubbornly healthy body. The kind of fire that led to elopements, to wild and clandestine love-making, could now, with too few exceptions, be found only among ne'er-do-wells, foreign adventurers, cut-throats or knaves; while the stability that promised security for the future and for the family, seemed generally to present itself with a sort of tiresome starchiness of body and jejuneness of mind, that thought it childish to abandon itself to any emotion.

She was deep enough, primitively female enough to demand and expect a certain savour of wickedness in him who wooed her. But she was more accustomed to perceive the outward signs of this coveted quality in the waiters at the Carlton, or the Savoy, and among dust-men, coal-heavers and butcher-boys, than in the men of her mother's circle.

Had man been tamed out of all recognition? Or was her instinct wrong, and was it perverse to sigh for fire, wickedness, stability, cultivation, and healthy athleticism—all in the same man? She had read of Alcibiades, of men who were not fragmentary. Could such a man be born nowadays, and if born could he survive? Certainly the men she had refused had not been of this stamp.

It was miserably disappointing, and with it all there was her mother's untiring insistence upon the urgency of getting married. It was more than disappointing: it was a genuine grievance, but a grievance of a kind which most young women nowadays bury unredressed, and the former existence of which in their lives they reveal only by a tired, wasted look in their faces, which leads their husbands to consider them—"delicate."

With all her fastidiousness in regard to the man of her desire, however, Cleopatra was not to be confused with the romantic idealist who craves for that which never has been and never can be possible on earth. To have misunderstood her to this extent would have been a gross injustice. She had built up her picture of her mate, not with the help of feverish and morbid fancy, but guided only by the hints of an exceptionally healthy body. Modest to a degree to which only great reserves of passion can attain, it was to her a dire need that her mate should have fire, because half-consciously she divined that only fire purified and sanctified the transition from girlhood to womanhood. Half-heartedness here, or the lack of a great passionate momentum, that carried everything before it, spelt to her something distinctly discomfiting, not to say indecent. And in this, far from being a romantic idealist, she was entirely right and realistic. This explains why her taste inclined more resolutely to the adventurous idea of love, to the impromptu element, to the wild ardour of first embraces that must perforce flee from the sight of fellow creatures, than to the kind of graduated passion which begins with conversation, proceeds to a public engagement with staring people all about you, and ends with the still more measured tempo of a Church wedding. All the waiting, all the temporising, all the toadlike deliberation that these various slow steps involved, ran counter to her deepest feeling, that her love must be a matter of touch and go, a sudden kindling of two fires, the burning not of green wood but of a volcano.

But where, these days, could she find the partner who was prepared, and above all equipped, to play his part to hers? This was her grievance. And again in justice to her it must be acknowledged that it was a genuine one.

The young man whom her mother was at present "running" for her, was a creature at whom, as a girl of eighteen, she would not have looked a second time. But how much more modest in its demands had her taste not become as she had advanced in years! How much more docile and unassuming! She saw other girls marrying men not unlike Denis Malster; so why couldn't she? She concluded that it must evidently be the fate of modern women to accept the third-rate, the third-best—in fact disillusionment as a law of their beings; and having no one to support her in her soundest instincts, she began rather to doubt the validity of their claim, than to turn resolutely away from marriage altogether.

And now there was to be a complication in her trouble. Leonetta was returning home for good—Leonetta, the child eight years her junior, Leonetta was now as fresh, as attractive, and as blooming, as she herself had been when she was just seventeen, and whom, from habit, she still called "Baby."

Quietly she had waited and waited for the man of her heart, and been able to do this without the additional annoyance of competition to disturb or excite her. Peacefully these seven years she had lain like a watcher on the shore, scanning the horizon with her glass, without even a nudge of the elbow from her younger sister. And now she was no longer to be alone. A distracting, possibly an utterly defeating element was going to be introduced into her peaceful though anxious existence, and she shuddered unmistakably at the thought.

As yet she had harboured no conscious hostility towards her junior, merely a desire to keep her as long as possible at a distance, in order that the one relationship of which she had the deepest dread—that of competitors in the same field—might be warded off indefinitely, or, better still, never experienced between them.