XVIII
Kate was alone at last. She had time to think. There were still three days left of the vacation for which she had begged when she perceived Honora's need of her, and these she spent in settling her room. It would not accommodate all of the furniture she had accumulated during those days of enthusiasm over Ray McCrea's return, so she sold the superfluous things. Truth to tell, however, she kept the more decorative ones. Honora's fate had taught her an indelible lesson. She saw clearly that happiness for women did not lie along the road of austerity.
Was it humiliating to have to acknowledge that women were desired for their beauty, their charm, for the air of opulence which they gave to an otherwise barren world? Her mind cast back over the ages--over the innumerable forms of seduction and subserviency which the instinct of women had induced them to assume, and she reddened to flame sitting alone in the twilight. Yet, an hour later, still thinking of the subject, she realized that it was for men rather than for women that she had to blush. Woman was what man had made her, she concluded.
Yet man was often better than woman--more generous, more just, more high-minded, possessed of a deeper faith.
Well, well, it was at best a confusing world! She seemed to be like a ship without a chart or a port of destination. But at least she could accept things as they were--even the fact that she herself was not "in commission," and was, philosophically speaking, a derelict.
"Other women seem to do things by instinct," she mused, "but I have, apparently, to do them from conviction. It must be the masculine traits in me. They say all women have masculine traits, that if they were purely feminine, they would be monstrous; and that all civilized men have much of the feminine in them or they would not be civilized. I suppose there's rather more of the masculine in me than in the majority of women."
Now Mary Morrison, she concluded, was almost pure feminine--she was the triumphant exposition of the feminine principle.
Some lines of Arthur Symons came to her notice--lines which she tried in vain not to memorize.
"'I am the torch,' she saith; 'and what to me
If the moth die of me? I am the flame
Of Beauty, and I burn that all may see
Beauty, and I have neither joy nor shame,
But live with that clear light of perfect fire
Which is to men the death of their desire.
'"I am Yseult and Helen, I have seen
Troy burn, and the most loving knight lies dead.
The world has been my mirror, time has been
My breath upon the glass; and men have said,
Age after age, in rapture and despair,
Love's few poor words before my mirror there.
"'I live and am immortal; in my eyes
The sorrow of the world, and on my lips
The joy of life, mingle to make me wise!'"...