A Scene from Hell.—The man who had been separated from his wife went one day to fetch his little six-year-old daughter from her mother. They meant to go for a walk, look at the shop-windows, and buy toys only for an hour. They were to meet before the mother's house. The little one came, half-sad, half-joyful, with a slightly roguish look.
This street, this street, this house, these stairs which only a short time ago he had hurried up with his hands full of presents in order for an hour long to see his beautiful home, and the best which life has to show—the young maidenly mother putting her child to bed! The two together! One still more beautiful than the other! And made more beautiful by love, or a friendship which has sprung up in painful solitude.
He took the little girl's hand, and they went down the now darkened street. Then the child turned round, and said aloud, "Mamma is coming behind us."
Why did he not turn round, but went on still faster, drawing the child with him?
Ask the pains of seven long years, which had robbed him of his self-esteem so that he no longer believed he possessed the poor solitary heart that followed him contritely and longed for reconciliation.
The child turned round yet again, and several times, as though it were a plot laid in all friendliness, and the man felt by the throbbing of the little hand how its heart beat in hope and expectation.
But he went straight forward, for he did not believe any more in the possibility of a return, and he did not dare to encounter a scornful smile, or a proud, sharp word. He turned down side-streets, but he felt that she followed. Who suffered most during this five minutes in hell, in this interplay of feelings? The child with her beautiful hopes which were disappointed; the mother with her injured self-esteem, as she sought on the street what she had thrown away; or the man with uncertainty and doubt in one half of his heart, and in the other the immeasurable grief of being obliged to hurt the innocent little child-heart? But while it was actually going on, he felt almost nothing, for he was stunned by the shock. Not till the next day did he feel the pain in his heart, and the longer the time that elapsed, the more that pain increased.
The Jewel-casket or his Better Half.—When a man during the first days of love has deposited the best and fairest part of his soul with the woman he loves, he has laid up a treasure with her. If then he sinks below the heavy burdens of everyday life and loses his ornaments, he generally finds them again with her; she has kept and guarded them (not always, however).
At such moments he calls her his better half, and such she is. She can, at the right time, return to him a beautiful thought or word, which he has given her once; then he is ashamed and laments over his fall. And when he sees his earlier better self in her, he realises how low he has sunk, while she still stands on the clear cliff. Then he looks up to her, cries out for help, and when she reaches him her hand, he is raised, and he thanks her for having saved him.
Paul explains this relation between man and wife, which is so often misunderstood and really difficult to understand. "For in the Lord, neither is the man without the woman, nor the woman without the man; for as the woman is from the man, so also is the man by the woman, but all is of God."