You are quite mistaken, dear, in what you have heard about his belonging to that radical party of strange creatures who rant and rage about progress in our times. Like all generous, magnanimous men, who are conscious of strength, he sympathizes with the weak, and is a champion of woman wherever she is wronged; and certainly in many respects, we must all admit women are wronged by the laws and customs of society. But no man could be nicer in his sense of feminine delicacy and more averse to associating with bold and unfeminine women than he. I must defend him there. I am sure that nothing could be more distasteful to him than the language and conduct of many of these dreadful female reformers of our day. If I am out of sorts with him I must at least do him this justice.
You inquire about Alice and Jim Fellows; my dear, there can be nothing there. They are perfectly well matched; a pair of flirts, and neither trusts the other an inch farther than they can see. Alice has one of those characters that lie in layers like the geologic strata that our old professor used to show us. The top layer is all show, and display and ambition; dig down below that and you find a warm volcanic soil where noble plants might cast root. But at present she is all in the upper stratum. She must have her run of flirting and fashion and adventure, and just now a splendid marriage is her ideal, but she is capable of a great deal in the depths of her nature. All I hope is she will not marry till she has got down into it, but she is starting under full sail now, coquetting to right and left, making great slaughter.
She looked magnificently at the wedding and quite outshone me. She has that superb Spanish style of beauty which promises to wear well and bloom out into more splendor as time goes on, and she has a good heart with all her nonsense.
Well, dear, what a long letter! and must I add to it the account of the wedding glories—lists of silver and gold tea sets, and sets of pearls and diamonds? My dear, only fancy Tiffany's counters transferred bodily, with cards from A., B., and C., presenting this and that; fancy also the young men of your acquaintance silly-drunk, or stupid-drunk in the latter part of the night in the supper-room; fancy, if you can, the bridegroom carried up stairs, because he couldn't go up on his own feet!—this is a wedding! Never mind! the bride had three or four sets of diamond shoe-buckles, and rubies and emeralds in the profusion of the Arabian Nights. Well, it will be long before I care for such a wedding! I am sick of splendors, sated with nick-nacks, my doll is stuffed with saw-dust, &c., &c., but I shall ever be your loving
Eva.
P. S.—My Dear—A case of conscience!—Would it be a sin to flirt a little with Sydney, just enough to aggravate somebody else? Sydney's, you mind, is not a deep heart-case. He only wants me because I am hard to catch, and have been the fashion. I'll warrant him against breaking his heart for anybody. However, I don't believe I will flirt after all I'll—try some other square of the chess-board.
The confidential conversation held with me by Mrs. Van Arsdel had all the effect on my mental castle-building that a sudden blow had on Alnaschar's basket of glass ware in the Arabian tales.
Nobody is conscious how far he has been in dreamland till he is awakened. I was now fully aroused to the fact that I was in love with Eva Van Arsdel, to all intents and purposes, so much in love as made the nourishing and cherishing of an intimate friendship an impossibility, and only a specious cloak for a sort of moral dishonesty. Now I might have known this fact in the beginning, and I scolded and lectured myself for my own folly in not confessing it to myself before. I had been received by the family as a friend. I had been trusted with their chief treasure, with the understanding that it was to belong not to me but another, and there was a species of moral indelicacy to my mind in having suffered myself to become fascinated by her as I now felt that I was. But I did not feel adequate to congratulating her as the betrothed bride of another man; nay, more, when I looked back on the kind of intimate and confidential relations that had been growing up between us, I could not but feel that it was not safe for me to continue them. Two natures cannot exactly accord, cannot keep time and tune together, without being conscious of the fact and without becoming necessary to each other; and such relations in their very nature tend to grow absorbing and exclusive. It was plain to me that if Eva were to marry Wat Sydney I could not with honor and safety continue the kind of intimacy we had been so thoughtlessly and so delightfully enjoying for the past few weeks.
But how to break it off without an explanation, and how make that explanation? There is a certain responsibility resting on a man of conscience and honor, about accepting all that nearness of access, and that closeness of intimacy which the ignorant innocence of young girls often invites. From his very nature, from his education, from his position in society, a young man knows more of what the full significance and requirements of marriage are to be than a young woman can, and he must know the danger of absorbing and exclusive intimacy with other than a husband. The instincts of every man teach that marriage must be engrossing and monopolizing, that it implies a forsaking of all others, and a keeping unto one only; and how could that be when every taste and feeling, every idiosyncracy and individual peculiarity made the society of some other person more agreeable?
Without undue personal vanity, a man will surely know when there is a special congeniality of nature between himself and a certain woman, and he is bound in conscience and honor to look ahead in all his intimacies and see what must be the inevitable result of them according to the laws of the human mind. Because I had neglected this caution, because I had yielded myself blindly to the delicious enchantment of a new enthusiasm, I had now come to a place where I knew neither how to advance nor recede.