Then, after a pause, Harding said: 'Will you give me this waltz?' She assented, and, as they made their way through the dancers, he added: 'But I believe you do not care about dancing. If you'd prefer it, we might go for a walk down the room. Perhaps you'd like an ice? This is the way to the buffet.'
But Alice and Harding did not stop long there; they were glad to leave the heat of gas, the odour of sauces, the effervescence of the wine, the detonations of champagne, the tumult of laughter, the racing of plates, the heaving of bosoms, the glittering of bodices, for the peace and the pale blue refinement of the long blue drawing-room. How much of our sentiments and thoughts do we gather from our surroundings; and the shining blue of the turquoise-coloured curtains, the pale dead-blue of the Louis XV. furniture, and the exquisite fragility of the glass chandeliers, the gold mirrors rutilant with the light of some hundreds of tall wax candles, were illustrative of the light dreams and delicate lassitude that filled the souls of the women as they lay back whispering to their partners, the crinolettes lifting the skirts over the edges of the sofas. Here the conversation seems serious, there it is smiling, and broken by the passing and repassing of a fan.
'Only four days more of Dublin,' said Harding; 'I have settled, or rather the fates have settled, that I am to leave next Saturday.'
'And where are you going? to London?'
'Yes, to London. I am sorry I am leaving so soon; but it can't be helped. I have met many nice people here—some of whom I shall not be able to forget.'
'You speak as if it were necessary to forget them—it is surely always better to remember.'
'I shall remember you.'
'Do you think you will?'
At this moment only one thing in the world seemed to be of much real importance—that the man now sitting by her side should not be taken away from her. To know that he existed, though far from her, would be almost enough—a sort of beacon-light—a light she might never reach to, but which would guide her . . . whither?
In no century have men been loved so implicitly by women as in the nineteenth; nor could this be otherwise, for putting aside the fact that the natural wants of love have become a nervous erethism in the struggle that a surplus population of more than two million women has created, there are psychological reasons that to-day more than ever impel women to shrink from the intellectual monotony of their sex, and to view with increasing admiration the male mind; for as the gates of the harem are being broken down, and the gloom of the female mind clears, it becomes certain that woman brings a loftier reverence to the shrine of man than she has done in any past age, seeing, as she now does, in him the incarnation of the freedom of which she is vaguely conscious and which she is perceptibly acquiring. So sets the main current that is bearing civilization along; but beneath the great feminine tide there is an undercurrent of hatred and revolt. This is particularly observable in the leaders of the movement; women who in the tumult of their aspirations, and their passionate yearnings towards the new ideal, and the memory of the abasement their sex have been in the past, and are still being in the present, subjected to, forget the laws of life, and with virulent virtue and protest condemn love—that is to say, love in the sense of sexual intercourse—and proclaim a higher mission for woman than to be the mother of men: and an adjuvant, unless corrected by sanative qualities of a high order, is, of course, found in any physical defect. But as the corporeal and incorporeal hereditaments of Alice Barton and Lady Cecilia Cullen were examined fully in the beginning of this chapter, it is only necessary to here indicate the order of ideas—the moral atmosphere of the time—to understand the efflorescence of the two minds, and to realize how curiously representative they are of this last quarter of the nineteenth century.