The Crystal Cup

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

Life, literature, nor history would be sufferable without the glamour of romance, however personally immiscible. The invention and constant use of the word “love” was proof of that. Mere decency ordained that a certain enchantment be shed over a function as native as hunger, where personal selection, imposed by civilization, was concerned.

Well, she accepted the fact. Also the fact that what her three friends called a sound endocrine constitution had saved her from becoming one of those semi-outlaws so freely discussed in her new circle. That was a phase she had no desire to dwell on, but she faced it squarely. Such women, she had been told, had sometimes the most idealized relationships, a mental and spiritual harmony seldom found with men; being rarely fools. Through this ominous lack of balance in the ductless glands and an arbitrary gift from Nature of cells which had no legitimate place in their anatomy, they were not only enabled but compelled to love their own sex; and as faithfully, protectively, and self-sacrificingly, as those that were fitted with normal response to man. Often more so. They were by no means mere sensualists. Nature here was as inexorable as elsewhere and she had not waited upon the decadence of civilizations to develop the type. It had existed since the dawn of history. No doubt since the dawn of time.

What Nature’s purpose was no man could guess. But that she had a purpose, methodical creature that she was, no intelligent man could doubt.

But she had passed over one Gita Carteret, even refusing to unbalance those cells, with everything working in her favor. The result was that Gita Carteret had been isolated high and dry. A rock in mid-ocean. A capacity for agreeable friendships, but about as emotional as an unhatched egg.

Well, that was that. She’d never think of it again if she could avoid it. But insularity had its compensations!

She felt as if something resistant in her brain were straining and creaking as she swung it ruthlessly to that strange moment when De Witt Turner’s words—uttered more or less at random—had turned her mind into a cauldron. But that frenzied moment had not only been a revelation but a deliverance. She had experienced a sensation of exhaustion when it was over, during which she felt that something had exploded, then taken wing. That such an access of hatred for a side of life still unexplored would never come again. She had been delivered—and for what?

Not for Eustace Bylant. Her recoil from that gleam in his eyes when he bent forward to kiss her was conclusive. No need to be asexual to be revolted at the thought of kissing a man she did not love and never could love. Even his light and frequent touch, of which she had barely been conscious as long as the lid was down, would be unendurable hereafter.

He “loved” her, of course. Always had. She had kept the lid down with a vengeance! She must have known from the first that he was in love with her in the orthodox male fashion—known it down in that, automatically recording invisible register; but that censored mind of hers had turned its back blithely; kept its conscious part suspended in that rarefied ether she had chosen as her habitat, peopled with queer eidola of her human acquaintance.

Too bad! It would have been the ideal solution to love Eustace, who had so much to offer, with whom she could live her life in a companionship found by few women with the men of their choice. But she did not. She almost hated him. He must never return here. She’d write and tell him so at once. If he hadn’t loved her she’d be willing to go on. But she had had one of her illuminating flashes. She knew he had reached the limit of his endurance.

But she had no intention of making him ridiculous. She had liked him too well for that, owed him too much. They could give out they were starting for Europe or South America—which he often talked of visiting—and he could travel while she lived in secrecy at the manor. The manor was her best friend. A friend, it seemed to her, and not only last night, that had schooled and soothed and strengthened her for centuries. A part of her. Even the blood that had come down to her had stained its boards. There had been a duel out there in the hall. And, in another century, an unbridled Carteret, who loved the wife of his guest, had been stabbed in his bedroom—the one her imperturbable grandmother had chosen for her own. . . .