“I beg of you not to mistake my zeal for impertinence. I have already received much good and many valuable truths from conversation with you, and I conceive myself under strong personal obligations of gratitude to you, that I hope may plead for me in extenuation of what you, no doubt, consider an impertinent intrusion. I would, as some measure of acknowledgment for such obligations, beg to be permitted to protest with you against this dangerous and obstinate isolation from all human sympathies, in which your life, dedicated to literary ambition, seems to be here fixed.”
“My good friend, Doctor Weasel, my life is my own, and my purposes are fixed. I need no sympathisers, since I am sufficient unto myself. They would only distract and minify the higher aims of my life. You may call it literary ambition, but I call it a settled and sacred purpose to achieve good in my day and generation. I am content, sir! Do not attempt to disturb that contentment!”
This reply was somewhat curtly delivered, and seemed to discompose the Doctor, who, however, hesitatingly persisted—
“Ah! ah! ah! yes! I expected to hear something of the sort from you, of course, but I beg you to consider that, under the harmonic law of reciprocation or mutual support and benefits, discovered by Fourier, and which lies at the base of all true organisation, you have no more right, as an individual, to hold yourself aloof, intellectually and socially, from the great body of mankind who are working for your benefit as well as for their own, than a rich man has to lock up his hoards of gold, and bury it where future generations may not reach it! The social state can only exist by individual concessions in favour of the whole.”
“Your argument,” was the cold response, “like all generalising postulates aimed at particular cases, overleaps its mark. I consider that I shall effect more earnest good by persisting in this isolation against which you protest. For as I do not ask or require the individual sympathies of my race, but rather choose the still-life of undisturbed sympathy and communion with nature, I feel that I shall accomplish more, far more, for humanity, in thus dedicating myself to her interpretation. Through me, as a medium, my fellow men may thus learn far loftier truths than they themselves might ever impart reciprocally amidst the babble of what you call social intercourse.”
“But you do not exclude women, surely? That would be unnatural; for you know that the life of man cannot be completely balanced, without the ameliorating presence and subduing contact of woman. He becomes a savage without her; his passions are brutalised, and the man is spiritually and socially degraded.”
“An admirable truism, Doctor! I honor and revere woman; in her high place she is to us, emphatically—angel! But this very reverence in which I hold her, prompts me to avoid contacts that may despoil me of my ideal. I am prepared to worship her, but not to degrade or look upon her degraded. There is nothing, in the range of human possibilities, so hideous to me as such contact—for I would hold my mother’s image always uncontaminated. I am a stranger, sir. I make no female acquaintances at present here.”
“Sorry,” said the Doctor, “very sorry, sir; for my special mission in this case was to persuade you to give up your isolation, in favor of an acquaintance with a most noble and charming woman, a friend of mine, who, having met with your papers in the journal you are now editing, is exceedingly anxious for an introduction, which I, in plain terms, have come to request. She is a woman of masculine and daring mind, and is taking the initial in most of the reform movements of the day, and particularly the most important of them all, the science of physiology as applicable to her own sex. She has taken the lead as the first lecturer on such subjects, and is accomplishing a vast amount of good. I am sure you will be much struck with her, and I never met two people whom I was more anxious to see brought together. You will appreciate each other, as physiology is one of your favorite subjects.”
“Bah! a lecture-woman! But I don’t mean to be disrespectful, Doctor. You could have told me nothing that would have more firmly fixed my resolution neither to be introduced to or know the person of whom you speak, on any terms whatever! Your manly-minded women are both my disgust and abhorrence!—as what they choose to call manliness is most usually a coarse and sensual impudence, based on inherent immodesty, which renders them incapable of recognising the delicate unities of propriety, either in thought or deed. I fully concede a woman’s capacity for displaying the great and even loftier processes of intellection; but the moment she unsexes herself, she and her thoughts become vulgarised. Such people are universally adventuresses, and of the most unscrupulous sort. I, as a stranger here, wish to run no risk of becoming entangled in their plausibilities. I am working for a full, free and frank recognition, by the social world, of my right to choose the place, the social circle rather, that I shall enter and become a part of. I do not wish to be dragged into such contacts, but to command them at my will!”
“But, sir,” persisted the Doctor, “she admires your papers so fervently, and pities the cruel and self-inflicted isolation in which you live, with such ardent, disinterested and motherly warmth, that you can scarcely, in your heart, be so obdurate as to reject her genial overture—the sole object of which is, to draw you forth into some participation with the milder humanities—to make you feel that New York is not really the savage, base and flowerless waste which we are led to presume you consider it, from the attitude you have assumed toward its social conditions. You are killing yourself here with tobacco, wine and labour, while she would show that even self-immolated genius may find a warm place to nestle, in distant lands, and near the matronly bosom, in spite of cold and sullen self-reliance!”