“My pride ought to have saved me from this humiliation,” she thought. “Having failed me in that, it must at least save me from the consequences of my misconduct. I’ll wear a cheerful face, whatever I may feel. I’ll cultivate whatever there is of jollity in me, and still better, whatever I possess of dignity. I’ll be social. I’ll entertain continually, as brother always wants me to do. I’ll have some of my girl friends with me every day and every night. I’ll busy myself with every duty I can find to do, and especially I shall devote myself to dear Dorothy. By the way, Arthur will expect a reply to his letter. I’ll begin my duty-doing with that.”
And so she wrote:
“You are by all odds the most ridiculous fellow, my dear Arthur, that I have yet encountered—the most preposterous, wrong headed, cantankerous (I hope that word is good English—and anyhow it is good Virginian, because it tells the truth) sort of human animal I ever yet knew. Do you challenge proof of my accusations? Think a bit and you’ll have it in abundance. Let me help you think by recounting your absurdities.
“You were a young man, practically alone in the world, with no fortune except an annuity, which must cease at your death. You had no associates except scientific persons who never think of anything but trilobites and hydrocyanic acid and symptoms and all that sort of thing. Suddenly, and by reason of no virtuous activity of your own, you found yourself the owner of one of the finest estates in Virginia, and the head of one of its oldest and most honored houses. In brief you came into an inheritance for which any reasonable young man of your size and age would have been glad to mortgage his hopes of salvation and cut off the entail of all his desires. There, that’s badly quoted, I suppose, but it is from Shakespeare, I think, and I mean something by it—a thing not always true of a young woman’s phrases when she tries her hand at learned utterance.
“Never mind that. This favored child of Fortune, Arthur Brent, M. D., Ph. D., etc., bitterly complains of Fate for having poured such plenty into his lap, rescuing him from a life of toil and trouble and tuberculosis—for I’m perfectly satisfied you would have contracted that malady, whatever it is, if Fate hadn’t saved you from it by compelling you to come down here to Virginia.
“Don’t criticise if I get my tenses mixed up a little, so long as my moods are right. Very well, to drop what my governess used to call ‘the historical present,’ this absurd and preposterous young man straightway ‘kicked against the pricks’—that’s not slang but a Biblical quotation, as you would very well know if you read your Bible half as diligently as you study your books on therapeutics. Better than that, it is truth that I’m telling you. You actually wanted to get rid of your heritage, to throw away just about the finest chance a young man ever had to make himself happy and comfortable and contented. You might even have indulged yourself in the pastime of making love to me, and getting your suit so sweetly rejected that you would ever afterwards have thought of the episode as an important part of your education. But you threw away even that opportunity.
“Now comes to you the greatest good fortune of all, and it positively frightens you so badly that you are planning to run away from it—if you can.
“Badinage aside, Arthur,—or should that word be ‘bandinage?’ You see I don’t know, and my dictionary is in another room, and anyhow the phrase sounds literary. Now to go on. Really, Arthur, you are a ridiculous person. You have had months of daily, hourly, intimate association with Dorothy. With your habits of observation, and still more your splendid gifts in that way, you cannot have failed to discover her superiority to young women generally. If you have failed, if you have been so blind as not to see, let me point out the fact to you. Did you ever know a better mind than hers? Was there ever a whiter soul? Has she not such a capacity of devotion and loyalty and love as you never saw in any other woman? Isn’t her courage admirable? Is not her truthfulness something that a man may trust his honor and his life to, knowing absolutely that his faith must always be secure?
“Fie upon you, Arthur. Why do you not see how lavishly Providence has dealt with you?
“But that is only one side of the matter, and by no means the better side of it. On that side lies happiness for you, and you have a strange dislike of happiness for yourself. You distrust it. You fear it. You put it aside as something unworthy of you, something that must impair your character and interrupt your work. Oh, foolish man! Has not your science taught you that it is the men of rich, full lives who do the greatest things in this world, and not the starvelings? Do you imagine for a moment that any monkish ascetic could have written Shakespeare’s plays or Beethoven’s music or fought Washington’s campaigns or rendered to the world the service that Thomas Jefferson gave?