Several days passed, and I gradually became so nervous and uneasy that I was on the point of inserting another "Personal" in the daily papers, when the answer arrived. It was brief and mysterious; you shall hear the whole of it:
"I thank you. Your letter is a sacred confidence which I
pray you never to regret. Your nature is sound and good. You
ask no more than is reasonable, and I have no real right to
refuse. In the one respect which I have hinted, I may have
been unskilful or too narrowly cautious: I must have the
certainty of this. Therefore, as a generous favor, give me
six months more! At the end of that time I will write to you
again. Have patience with these brief lines: another word
might be a word too much."
You notice the change in her tone? The letter gave me the strongest impression of a new, warm, almost anxious interest on her part. My fancies, as first at Wampsocket, began to play all sorts of singular pranks: sometimes she was rich and of an old family, sometimes moderately poor and obscure, but always the same calm, reposeful face and clear gray eyes. I ceased looking for her in society, quite sure that I should not find her, and nursed a wild expectation of suddenly meeting her, face to face, in the most unlikely places and under startling circumstances. However, the end of it all was patience—patience for six months.
There's not much more to tell; but this last letter is hard for me to read. It came punctually, to a day. I knew it would, and at the last I began to dread the time, as if a heavy note were falling due, and I had no funds to meet it. My head was in a whirl when I broke the seal. The fact in it stared at me blankly, at once, but it was a long time before the words and sentences became intelligible.
"The stipulated time has come, and our hidden romance is at
an end. Had I taken this resolution a year ago, it would
have saved me many vain hopes, and you, perhaps, a little
uncertainty. Forgive me, first, if you can, and then hear
the explanation!
"You wished for a personal interview: you have had, not
one, but many. We have met, in society, talked face to
face, discussed the weather, the opera, toilettes, Queechy,
Aurora Floyd, Long Branch, and Newport, and exchanged a
weary amount of fashionable gossip; and you never guessed
that I was governed by any deeper interest! I have purposely
uttered ridiculous platitudes, and you were as smilingly
courteous as if you enjoyed them: I have let fall remarks
whose hollowness and selfishness could not have escaped you,
and have waited in vain for a word of sharp, honest, manly
reproof. Your manner to me was unexceptionable, as it was to
all other women: but there lies the source of my
disappointment, of—yes—of my sorrow!
"You appreciate, I can not doubt, the qualities in woman
which men value in one another—culture, independence of
thought, a high and earnest apprehension of life; but you
know not how to seek them. It is not true that a mature and
unperverted woman is flattered by receiving only the general
obsequiousness which most men give to the whole sex. In the
man who contradicts and strives with her, she discovers a
truer interest, a nobler respect. The empty-headed, spindle-
shanked youths who dance admirably, understand something of
billiards, much less of horses, and still less of
navigation, soon grow inexpressibly wearisome to us; but the
men who adopt their social courtesy, never seeking to
arouse, uplift, instruct us, are a bitter disappointment.
"What would have been the end, had you really found me?
Certainly a sincere, satisfying friendship. No mysterious
magnetic force has drawn you to me or held you near me, nor
has my experiment inspired me with an interest which can not
be given up without a personal pang. I am grieved, for the
sake of all men and all women. Yet, understand me! I mean no
slightest reproach. I esteem and honor you for what you
are. Farewell!"
There! Nothing could be kinder in tone, nothing more humiliating in substance, I was sore and offended for a few days; but I soon began to see, and ever more and more clearly, that she was wholly right. I was sure, also, that any further attempt to correspond with her would be vain. It all comes of taking society just as we find it, and supposing that conventional courtesy is the only safe ground on which men and women can meet.
The fact is—there's no use in hiding it from myself (and I see, by your face, that the letter cuts into your own conscience)—she is a free, courageous, independent character, and—I am not. But who was she?