"Well, let us play pretending, as the children say. Grant that I could, I would hang your cabin with your own colors, fill it with books (all those I have heard you say you care for), make it a nest as rare as the bird it would shelter. You would reign supreme. When your highness would deign to honor her servant, I would come and humor your every whim. If you were glad, you could clap your hands and order music, and we would dance on the white deck, and we would skim through the sunshine of Southern seas on a spice-scented breeze. You make me poetical. And if you were angry, you could vent your feelings on me, and I would give in and bow my head to your mood. And we would drop anchor, and stroll through strange cities,—go far inland and glean folklore out of the beaten track of everyday tourists; and at night, when the harbor slept, we would sail out through the moonlight over silver seas. You are smiling,—you look so different when you smile; do you like my picture?"
"Some of it!"
"What not?"
"You!"
"Thank you."
"You asked me. Can't you understand where the spell lies? It is the freedom, the freshness, the vague danger, the unknown that has a witchery for me,—ay, for every woman!"
"Are you incapable of affection, then?"
"Of course not. I share," bitterly, "that crowning disability of my sex; but not willingly,—I chafe under it. My God! if it were not for that, we women would master the world! I tell you, men would be no match for us! At heart we care nothing for laws, nothing for systems; all your elaborately reasoned codes for controlling morals or man do not weigh a jot with us against an impulse, an instinct. We learn those things from you,—you tamed, amenable animals; they are not natural to us. It is a wise disposition of Providence that this untamableness of ours is corrected by our affections. We forge our own chains in a moment of softness, and then," bitterly, "we may as well wear them with a good grace. Perhaps many of our seeming contradictions are only the outward evidences of inward chafing. Bah! the qualities that go to make a Napoleon—superstition, want of honor, disregard of opinion, and the eternal I—are oftener to be found in a woman than a man. Lucky for the world, perhaps, that all these attributes weigh as nothing in the balance with the need to love, if she be a good woman; to be loved, if she is of a coarser fibre."
"I never met any one like you; you are a strange woman!"
"No, I am merely a truthful one. Women talk to me—why? I can't say; but always they come, strip their hearts and souls naked, and let me see the hidden folds of their natures. The greatest tragedies I have ever read are child's play to those I have seen acted in the inner life of outwardly commonplace women. A woman must beware of speaking the truth to a man; he loves her the less for it. It is the elusive spirit in her, that he divines but cannot seize, that fascinates and keeps him."