At this point in her reading Edmonia laid the letter in her lap and left it there for a considerable time before taking it up again. She was thinking, a trifle sadly, perhaps, but not gloomily or with pain.
“He is right,” she reflected. “I sympathize with him in his high purposes and I share the general admiration of his character and genius. But I do not share his real enthusiasms as Dorothy does. I have none of that love for scientific truth for its own sake, which is an essential part of his being. I have none of his self-sacrificing earnestness, none of that divine discontent which is the mainspring of all his acts and all his thinking. It is greatly better as Fate has ordered it. I am no fit life partner for him. Had he married me I should have made him happy in a way, perhaps, but it would have been at cost of his deterioration. It is better as it is—immeasurably better,—and I must school myself to think of it in that way. If I am worthy even of the friendship that he so generously gives me, I shall learn to rejoice that he gives the love to Dorothy instead, and not to me. I must learn to think of his good and the fit working out of his life as the worthiest thing I can strive for. And I am learning this lesson. It is a little hard at first, but I shall master it.”
A few days later Dorothy, in one of her unconsciously self-revealing letters, wrote:
“I am sending you the Darwin book, with all my crude little notes in the margins. I have sealed it up quite securely and paid full letter postage on it, because it would be unjust to the government to send a book with writing in it, at book postage rates. Besides, I don’t want anybody but you to read the notes. Edmonia asked me to let her see the book before sending it, but I told her I couldn’t because I should die of shame if anybody should read my presumptuous comments on so great a book. For it is great, really and truly great. It is the greatest explanation of nature that anybody ever yet offered. At least that is the way it impresses me. Edmonia asked me why I was so chary of letting her see notes that I was entirely willing for you to see, and at first I couldn’t explain it even to myself, for, of course, I love Edmonia better than anybody else in the world, and I have no secrets from her. I told her I would have to think the matter over before I could explain it, and she said: ‘Think it out, child, and when you find out the explanation you may tell me about it or not, just as you please.’ She kindly laughed it off, but it troubled me a good deal. I couldn’t understand why it was that I couldn’t bear to let her see the notes, while I rather wanted you to read them. I found it all out at last, and explained it to her, and she seemed satisfied. It’s because you know so much. You are my Master, and you always know how to allow for your pupil’s wrong thinking even while you set me right. Besides, somehow I am never ashamed of my ignorance when only you know of it. Edmonia said that was quite natural, and that I was entirely right not to show the scribbled book to her. So I don’t think I hurt her feelings, do you?
“Now, I want to tell you about another thought of mine which may puzzle you—or it may make you laugh as it does other people. There’s a woman here—a very bright woman but not, to my taste, a lovely one—who is very learned in a superficial way. She knows everything that is current in science, art, literature, and fashion, though she seems to me deficient in thoroughness. She ‘has the patter of it all at her tongue’s end,’ as they say here, but I don’t think she knows much behind the patter. A wise editor whom I met at dinner a few days ago, described her as ‘a person who holds herself qualified to discuss and decide anything in heaven or earth from the standpoint of the cyclopædia and her own inner consciousness.’ She writes for one of the newspapers, though I didn’t know it when she talked with me about Darwin. I told her I thought of Darwin’s book as a great poem. You would have understood me, if I had said that to you, wouldn’t you? You know I always think of the grass, and the trees and the flowers, and the birds and the butterflies, and all the rest, as nature’s poems, and this book seems to me a great epic which dominates and includes, and interprets them all, just as Homer and Milton and Virgil and Tasso and especially Shakespeare, dominate all the little twitterings of all the other poets. Anyhow it seems to me that a book which tells us how all things came about, is a poem and a very great one. I said so to this woman, and next day I saw it all printed in the newspaper for which she writes. I shouldn’t have minded that as she didn’t tell my name, but I thought she seemed to laugh and jeer at my thought. She said something witty about trying to turn Darwin into dactyls and substitute dithyrambics for dogmatics in the writings of Sir Isaac Newton. Somehow it all sounded bright and witty as one read it in the newspaper. But is that the way in which a serious thought ought to be treated? Do the newspapers, when they thus flippantly deal with serious things, really minister to human advancement? Do they not rather retard it by making jests of things that are not jests? I have come to know a good many newspaper writers since I have been here, and I am convinced that they have no real seriousness in their work, no controlling conscience. ‘The newspaper’ said one of the greatest of them to me not long ago, ‘is a mirror of today. It doesn’t bother itself much with tomorrow or yesterday.’ I asked him why it should not reflect today accurately, instead of distorting if with smartness. ‘Oh,’ he answered, ‘we can’t stop to consider such things. We must do that which will please and attract the reader, regardless of everything else. Dulness is the only thing we must avoid as we shun the pestilence, and erudition and profundity are always dull.’
“ ‘But doesn’t the newspaper assume to teach men and women?’ I asked. ‘And is it not in conscience bound to teach them the truth and not falsehood?’
“ ‘Oh, yes, that’s the theory,’ he answered. ‘But how can we live up to it? Take this matter of Darwinism, for example. We can’t afford to employ great scientific men to discuss it seriously in our columns. And if we did, only a few would read what they wrote about it. We have bright fellows on our editorial staffs who know how to make it interesting by playing with it, and for our purpose that is much better than any amount of learning.’
“I have been thinking this thing over and I have stopped the reading of newspapers. For I find that they deal in the same way with everything else—except politics, perhaps, and, of course, I know nothing of politics. I read a criticism of a concert the other day in which a singer was—well, never mind the details. The man that wrote that criticism didn’t hear the concert at all, as he confessed to me. He was attending another theatre at the time. Yet he assumed to criticise a singer to her detriment, utterly ignoring the fact that she has her living to make by singing and that his criticism might seriously affect her prospects. He laughed the matter off, and when I seemed disturbed about it he said: ‘For your sake, Miss South, I’ll make amends. She sings again tomorrow, and while I shall not be able to hear her, I’ll give her such a laudation as shall warm the cockles of her heart and make her manager mightily glad. You’ll forgive me, then, for censuring her yesterday, I’m sure.’ I’m afraid I misbehaved myself then. I told him I shouldn’t read his article, that I hated lies and shams and false pretences, and that I didn’t consider his articles worth reading because they had no truth or honesty behind them. It was dreadfully rude, I know, and yet I’m not sorry for it. For it seemed to make an impression on him. He told me that he only needed some such influence as mine to give him a conscience in his work, and he actually asked me to marry him! Think of the absurdity of it! I told him I wasn’t thinking of marrying anybody—that I was barely seventeen, that—oh, well, I dismissed the poor fellow as gently as I could.”
But while the proposal of marriage by the newspaper man, and several other such solicitations which followed it, struck Dorothy at first as absurdities, they wrought a marked change in her mental attitude. Two at least of these proposals were inspired by higher considerations than those of the plantation which Dorothy represented, and were pressed with fervor and tenderness by men quite worthy to aspire to Dorothy’s hand. These were men of substance and character, in whose minds the fascination which the Virginia girl unwittingly exercised over everybody with whom she came into contact—men and women alike—had quickly ripened into a strong and enduring passion. Dorothy suffered much in rejecting such suits as theirs, but she learned something of herself in the process. She for the first time realized that she was a woman and that she had actually entered upon that career of womanhood which had before seemed so far away in the future that thoughts of it had never before caused her to blush and tremble as they did now.
These things set her thinking, and in her thinking she half realized her own state of mind. She began dimly to understand the change that had come over her attitude and feeling towards Arthur Brent. She would not let herself believe that she loved him as a woman loves but one man while she lives; but she admitted to herself that she might come to love him in that way if he should ever ask her to do so with the tenderness and manifest sincerity which these others had shown. But of that she permitted herself to entertain no hope and even no thought. His letters to her, indeed, seemed to put that possibility out of the question. For at this time Arthur held himself under severe restraint. He was determined that he should not in any remotest way take advantage of his position with respect to Dorothy, or use his influence over her as a means of winning her. He knew now his own condition of mind and soul in all its fulness. He was conscious now that the light of his life lay in the hope of some day winning Dorothy’s love and making her all and altogether his own. But he was more than ever determined, as he formulated the thought in his own mind, to give Dorothy a chance, to take no advantage of her, to leave her free to make choice for herself. It was his fixed determination, should she come back heart whole from this journey, to woo her with all the fervor of his soul; but the more determined he became in this resolution, the more resolutely did he guard his written words against the possibility that they might reveal aught of this to her. “If she ever comes to love me as my wife,” he resolved, “it shall be only after she has had full opportunity to make another choice.”