A man's woman

by Frank Norris

When, during that never-to-be-forgotten scene in the breakfast-room of the doctor's house, she had warned Bennett that if he persisted in his insane resolution he would stamp out her affection for him, Lloyd had only half believed what she said. But when at last it dawned upon her that she had spoken wiser than she knew, that this was actually true, and that now, no matter how she might desire it, she could not love him any longer, it seemed as though her heart must break. It was precisely as though Bennett himself, the Bennett she had known, had been blotted out of existence. It was much worse than if Bennett had merely died. Even then he would have still existed for her, somewhere. As it was, the man she had known simply ceased to be, irrevocably, finally, and the warmth of her love dwindled and grew cold, because now there was nothing left for it to feed upon.

Never until then had Lloyd realised how much he had been to her; how he had not only played so large a part in her life, but how he had become a very part of her life itself. Her love for him had been like the air, like the sunlight; was delicately knitted and intertwined into all the innumerable intricacies of her life and character. Literally, not an hour had ever passed that, directly or indirectly, he had not occupied her thoughts. He had been her inspiration; he had made her want to be brave and strong and determined, and it was because of him that the greater things of the world interested her. She had chosen a work to be done because he had set her an example. So only that she preserved her womanliness, she, too, wanted to count, to help on, to have her place in the world's progress. In reality all her ambitions and hopes had been looking toward one end only, that she might be his equal; that he might find in her a companion and a confidante; one who could share his enthusiasms and understand his vast projects and great aims.

And how had he treated her when at last opportunity had been given her to play her part, to be courageous and strong, to prevail against great odds, while he stood by to see? He had ignored and misunderstood, and tossed aside as childish and absurd that which she had been building up for years. Instead of appreciating her heroism he had forced her to become a coward in the eyes of the world. She had hoped to be his equal, and he had treated her as a school-girl. It had all been a mistake. She was not and could not be the woman she had hoped. He was not and never had been the man she had imagined. They had nothing in common.

But it was not easy to give Bennett up, to let him pass out of her life. She wanted to love him yet. With all her heart and strength, in spite of everything—woman that she was, she had come to that—in spite of everything she wanted to love him. Though he had broken her will, thwarted her ambitions, ignored her cherished hopes, misunderstood and mistaken her, yet, if she could, Lloyd would yet have loved him, loved him even for the very fact that he had been stronger than she.

Again and again she tried to awaken this dead affection, to call back this vanished love. She tried to remember the Bennett she had known; she told herself that he loved her; that he had said that the great things he had done had been done only with an eye to her approval; that she had been his inspiration no less than he had been hers; that he had fought his way back, not only to life, but to her. She thought of all he had suffered, of the hardships and privations beyond her imagination to conceive, that he had undergone. She tried to recall the infinite joy of that night when the news of his safe return had come to her; she thought of him at his very best—how he had always seemed to her the type of the perfect man, masterful, aggressive, accomplishing great projects with an energy and determination almost superhuman, one of the world's great men, whose name the world still shouted. She called to mind how the very ruggedness of his face; with its massive lines and harsh angles, had attracted her; how she had been proud of his giant's strength, the vast span of his shoulders, the bull-like depth of his chest, the sense of enormous physical power suggested by his every movement.

But it was all of no effect. That Bennett was worse than dead to her. The Bennett that now came to her mind and imagination was the brutal, perverse man of the breakfast-room at Medford, coarse, insolent, intractable, stamping out all that was finest in her, breaking and flinging away the very gifts he had inspired her to offer him. It was nothing to him that she should stand degraded in the eyes of the world. He did not want her to be brave and strong. She had been wrong; it was not that kind of woman he desired. He had not acknowledged that she, too, as well as he—a woman as well as a man might have her principles, her standards of honour, her ideas of duty. It was not her character, then, that he prized; the nobility of her nature was nothing to him; he took no thought of the fine-wrought texture of her mind. How, then, did she appeal to him? It was not her mind; it was not her soul. What, then, was left? Nothing but the physical. The shame of it; the degradation of it! To be so cruelly mistaken in the man she loved, to be able to appeal to him only on his lower side! Lloyd clasped her hands over her eyes, shutting her teeth hard against a cry of grief and pain and impotent anger. No, no, now it was irrevocable; now her eyes were opened. The Bennett she had known and loved had been merely a creature of her own imagining; the real man had suddenly discovered himself; and this man, in spite of herself, she hated as a victim hates its tyrant.

But her grief for her vanished happiness—the happiness that this love, however mistaken, had brought into her life—was pitiful. Lloyd could not think of it without the choke coming to her throat and the tears brimming her dull-blue eyes, while at times a veritable paroxysm of sorrow seized upon her and flung her at full length upon her couch, her face buried and her whole body shaken with stifled sobs. It was gone, it was gone, and could never be called back. What was there now left to her to live for? Why continue her profession? Why go on with the work? What pleasure now in striving and overcoming? Where now was the exhilaration of battle with the Enemy, even supposing she yet had the strength to continue the fight? Who was there now to please, to approve, to encourage? To what end the days of grave responsibilities, the long, still nights of vigil?

She began to doubt herself. Bennett, the man, had loved his work for its own sake. But how about herself, the woman? In what spirit had she gone about her work? Had she been genuine, after all? Had she not undertaken it rather as a means than as an end—not because she cared for it, but because she thought he would approve, because she had hoped by means of the work she would come into closer companionship with him? She wondered if this must always be so—the man loving the work for the work's sake; the woman, more complex, weaker, and more dependent, doing the work only in reference to the man.

But often she distrusted her own conclusions, and, no doubt, rightly so. Her mind was yet too confused to reason calmly, soberly, and accurately. Her distress was yet too keen, too poignant to permit her to be logical. At one time she was almost ready to admit that she had misjudged Bennett; that, though he had acted cruelly and unjustly, he had done what he thought was best. His sacrifice of Ferriss was sufficient guarantee of his sincerity. But this mistrust of herself did not affect her feeling toward him. There were moments when she condoned his offence; there was never an instant she did not hate him.

And this sentiment of hatred itself, independent of and apart from its object, was distasteful and foreign to her. Never in her life had Lloyd hated any one before. To be kind, to be gentle, to be womanly was her second nature, and kindness, gentleness, and womanliness were qualities that her profession only intensified and deepened. This newcomer in her heart, this fierce, evil visitor, that goaded her and pricked and harried her from day to day and throughout so many waking nights, that roused the unwonted flash in her eye and drove the hot, angry blood to her smooth, white forehead and knotted her levelled brows to a dark and lowering frown, had entered her life and being, unsought for and undesired. It did not belong to her world. Yet there it sat on its usurped throne deformed and hideous, driving out all tenderness and compunction, ruling her with a rod of iron, hardening her, embittering her, and belittling her, making a mockery of all sweetness, fleering at nobility and magnanimity, lowering the queen to the level of the fishwife.