“Oh, it will all fall from you. We don’t change much under the armor Life forces us into. Dismiss Ishbel from your mind. Take care of yourself. What is Ishbel’s business when weighed against a lifetime of horror and demoralization? Nobody knows this better than Ishbel. I fancy if you don’t go, she’ll chuck the business. It’s a deuced unpleasant position for her. And she has made enough to live on comfortably until she can marry Dark —”
“I don’t believe it. It might be years —”
The butler entered and announced luncheon. Julia smoothed her hair, feeling much herself again.
“I can see the force of all your arguments. And I am tempted. I don’t deny it. But you must give me time to think it over. Perhaps I exaggerate about Ishbel. But there is another point: I was not consulted in regard to my first marriage. I should be something more than a fool if I rushed blindly into another, no matter what the temptations. Still—Come, you must be starved.”
X
Life moves in circles. Some are larger than the span between infancy and senility, but that is about the only difference we know of. It is a far cry from the primigenous mere female, or even the Sabines, to the women that compose the advance guard of their sex to-day, but when man wants to win and wear this highest product of civilization, he would better kidnap her, and pay her the compliment of arguing with her brain later. Her impulses are still primitive, but they must be taken by assault. The more he reasons, the more vigorously will she throw up mental defences, and, what is worse, in the utmost good faith with herself.
This, of course, in regard to women that already know something of life, or that have an instinctive love of liberty and independence. The maternal girl, and she is legion, may safely be left in charge of the race, and wooed in the orthodox fashion favored of society. But the women that exert a powerful attraction for men, either exceptionally advanced themselves, or exceptionally weak in character while possessing every charm of mind, women that are approaching closer and closer to that exact balance of masculine and feminine attributes which, when attained, will give them the one perfect happiness, setting them free, as it must, from the present curse of the race, the longing for completion, are already too close to independence to be won by simple methods. It is little, after all, that man can give them. They are conscious of too many resources both within themselves and in life; after a man’s novelty has worn off, they are more likely than not—certainly apt!—to find him their inferior in brain, and almost inevitably in character, full of the little weaknesses and dependencies of childhood. If they make these discoveries after marriage, the man has some small chance of keeping his spouse, particularly if he has won a measure of respect by audacity and brute force plus sympathy, but too much consideration for a woman who is almost half male while he is still but one-fourth female will lose him the game.
Nigel, of all the men that Julia had met, was the best equipped to appeal to sentimental, romantic, and clever young women, who were at the same time cultivating their wings for the higher flights. As a matter of fact, he had appealed to a good many women of various sorts in his earlier twenties when he was all freshness, frankness, adoration, and honest eager youth. Later, when he wore the literary halo with ease and modesty, his charm was not diminished; and it was easy to predict that when the war was really over and London, her mourning laid aside, roused herself to do honor to her heroes, Nigel would come in for thrice his share of lionizing. As a matter of fact, he did, and he philosophically accepted it as a compensation for the lack of better things.
When he stepped from the fly on that gloomy Wednesday morning and walked across the dripping garden, the dark and romantic wall of woods behind him, he looked as gallant a knight as ever came to the rescue of a damsel in distress; and Julia, as dreary as Mariana in the moated grange, was in the proper frame of mind to be taken by assault. She was still very young, she was very lonely, she was on the verge of despair; her imagination, always active, had been bred in youth by dreams, and developed later by real castles and titles, purple moors, London society, and great expectations. She hailed from the West Indies, one of the most romantic spots to look at on earth, and all the circumstances of her life there had been exceptional. She was still more or less romantically environed, when you consider the old world dinginess, inconvenience, and isolation of White Lodge, a presumptive lunatic always threatening developments, and that she was as much cut off from her friends as if she literally were in an underground dungeon with walls instead of trees dropping the constant tear. Take all this into consideration, and add the momentous fact that she had never loved, and had arrived at the susceptible age of twenty-five, that she was more attracted to Nigel than she ever had been to any man, that underneath her despair and her manufactured stolidity she was full of eager curiosity and the desire to live, and it will readily be seen that if Nigel did not win her, it was strictly his own fault.
He should have retained the fly. He should have descended upon her like a whirlwind (having ascertained that France was out of the way,—which, as a matter of fact, he did at Stanmore), refused to listen to protests, caused in her bewildered mind what psychologists call an inhibition, swept her out into the fly, up to London, on to an Atlantic liner (passage already engaged), turned her over to Mrs. Herbert (thus eliminating every possible excuse for reproach during the subsequent and less glamorous period of matrimony), joined her at the earliest possible moment in Reno (where Bridgit and Reno would have seen that she was sufficiently amused), and when she walked out of the court-house with her decree, met her with a license. That is the only way to manage them, my masters. Try it, or take a back seat, now and forever.