Pray You, Sir, Whose Daughter?

by Helen H. Gardener

"Certainly," he said, "but that is different. It—"

"Yes, it is different; quite different. You love papa, and it would be a pain to you to keep your mental books locked up from him. You respect papa, and you would not be able to live a life of pretense with him. You—"

"Gertrude! Oh, darling! I love you. I love you. You know that," he said, grasp ing both her hands and covering them with kisses. She snatched them away, and covered her face with them to hide the tears which were a surprise and shock to herself.

"I should not have taken her there," he thought. "I'm a great fool."

He did not at all comprehend the girl's point of view, and she resented his. He could not imagine why, and her twenty years of inexperience in handling such a view of life as had suddenly grown up within her, made her unable to express quite fully why she did resent his assumption that she should not be allowed to use her heart or brain beyond the limits set for their exercise by conventional theory. She could not express in words why she felt insulted and outraged in her self-respect that he should assume that life was and should be led by her, upon a distinctly different and narrower plane than his own. She knew that she could not accept his explanation, that it was his intense love that wished to shield her from knowledge of all that was ugly—of all the deeper and sadder meanings of human experience; but she felt unequal to making him understand by any words at her command how far from her idea of an exalted love such an assumption was.

That he should sincerely believe that as a matter of course much that was and should be quite common in his own life should be kept from, covered up, blurred into indistinction to her, came to her with a shock too sudden and heavy for words. She had built an exalted ideal of absolute mental companionship between those who loved. She had always thought that one day she should pass through the portals of some vast building by the side of a husband to whom all within was new as it would be to her. She had fancied that neither spoke; that both read the tablets of architecture—and of human legend on every face—so nearly alike that by a glance of the eye she could say to him, "I know what you are thinking of all this. It stirs such or such a memory. It strikes the chord that holds these thoughts or those." But she read as plainly now that this man who thought he loved her, whom she had grown to feel she might one day love, had no such conception of a union of lives. To him marriage would mean a physical possession of a toy more or less valuable, more or less to be cherished or to be set under a glass case, whenever his real life, his real thoughts, his deeper self were stirred. These were to be kept for men—his mentally developed equals. She understood full well that if she could have said this to him he would have been shocked, would have resented such a contemptuous interpretation of what he truly believed to be a wholly respectful love, offered upon wholly respectful terms. But to her, it seemed the mere tossing down of a filbert to a pretty kitten, that it might amuse him for a few moments with its graceful antics. When he tired of the kitten, or bethought him of the serious duties of life, he could turn the key and count on finding the amusing little creature to play with again next day in case he cared to relax himself with a sight of its gambols. She resented such a view of the value of her life. She was humiliated and indignant. The perfectly apparent lack of comprehension on his part of any lapse of respect in attitude toward her, the entire unconsciousness of the insult to her whole nature, in his assumption of a divine right of individual growth and development to which she had no claim, stung her beyond all power of speech. The very fact that he had no comprehension of the affront himself, added to it its utterly hopeless feature. The love of a man offered on such terms is an insult, she said, over and over to herself; but aloud she said nothing.

She had heard, vaguely, through her tumult of feeling, his terms of endearment, his appeals to her tenderness and—alas! unfortunately for him—his apologies for having taken her to such a place. She became distinctly aware of these latter first and it steadied her. They had reached Washington Square.

"Yes, that revelation in Mulberry Street was a horrible shock to me," she said, looking at him for the first time since they had entered the carriage; "but, do you know, I think there are more shocking things than even that done in the name of love every day—things as heartless and offensively uncomprehending of what is fine and true in life as that wretched woman's conduct with the lifeless form of her baby."

He recognized a hard ring in her voice, but her eyes looked kind and gentle.

"How do you mean?" he asked, touching her hand as it lay on her empty purse in her lap.