Feb. 9, 19—.
My dear Alexa,—
No—that formal greeting inadequately expresses my emotion at the moment—I will say then, Alexa dearest—
I am really sorry that my last letter should have put you into such a flutter; should have ruffled your mind’s plumage so quite unduly. I find I nearly always do come to grief in this way when I neglect the advice given me years and years ago by a wise and wicked old man, when I was a foolish and a passably good young one.
“My boy,” that old rapscallion said—he was holding up a glass of his own port to the candle when he said it, and enjoying the delight of the eye previous to the pleasure of the palate. “My boy, never tell the truth to women. You’ll find it infernally difficult to do any way, and it always turns out badly.” He gave me much other counsel of a similar sort. Sometimes I have acted upon it and sometimes I have not. When I have I have always scored handsomely; when I haven’t I have invariably been sorry for myself.
He was a remarkable old gentleman, old Gillion. He enjoyed the worst reputation of any man of his set. When I say enjoyed I mean enjoyed. He loved it; he cherished it as a collector of books cherishes his rare old editions. He died at the age of eighty-seven in an odour of diabolism, tenderly served and waited upon by a troop of affectionate and expectant grandchildren, to whom he left not a penny. Years before he had invested all his money in an annuity. But they didn’t know that. They say he died with a smile on his lips. I can quite believe it. He always loved irony.
It is, as that sage reprobate said, infernally difficult to tell the truth to women, and that, I make no doubt, is why it so seldom gets told. For one thing the truth, the bare truth, is nearly always unpleasant, and so you see, the temptation to lie attacks us on our softer, our more kindly, side. I am quite sure that nine times out of ten when men deceive women they do it much less for their own sakes than for the sakes of the women. Now, don’t raise your eyebrows and draw down your lip-corners, because that really is so. Moreover, they often feel (if they be of a philosophic cast they know) that the deception comes nearer to the truth than the actual bald fact would be. Bald facts are seldom or never true facts. Truth is ever a thing of atmosphere, of light and shade, of fine gradations. Truth is a point of view, sometimes a very temporary and transient point of view.
A point of view. Yes, that’s it. And that is why it is not only difficult but, I incline to think, impossible for men to tell the truth to women. Suppose you have two persons whose eyes are so constructed that they can only see the world through glasses, and suppose one of these persons is doomed always to wear green glasses and the other pink glasses. How on earth can any object ever look the same to both? A can tell B that a sheet of paper is green, but he may say so for ever, and yet B will always see it pink. And the fun of the thing is that it is really white all the time! And what do I mean by “really”? I don’t know.
But are men and women so different as all that, you will be asking yourself. Yes, they are. Quite as different as all that, and more so. They are wonderfully different. The longer I live and the more I look about me the greater and more distinct do the differences seem to become. I know it’s the fashion just now, especially among strong women and weak men, to deny this, and to declare that as we evolve we grow nearer to, more like, each other. Sheer nonsense, my dear, sheer nonsense!
One of the most notable marks of civilisation is the way in which it differentiates the sexes. A savage father is much nearer to his daughter than I am to you. I am rather sorry for it, but it can’t be helped, and this letter of yours goes some way towards proving it. And yet I don’t know that I am quite honest in saying that I am sorry for it—another instance of how difficult it is to tell the truth, you see—for it seems to me that a good deal of the joy, or at any rate of the excitement, of life is brought about by just that difference. Life has little that is exciting to your civilised man, and if you deprive him of that...!