April 20, 19–.
Himself and I have gone through the inevitable changes that life and love, marriage and parenthood, bring to all human creatures; but no one of the dear old group of friends has so developed as Francesca. Her last letter, posted in Scotland and delivered here seven days later, is like a breath of the purple heather and brings her vividly to mind.
In the old days when we first met she was gay, irresponsible, vivacious, and a decided flirt,—with symptoms of becoming a coquette. She was capricious and exacting; she had far too large an income for a young girl accountable to nobody; she was lovely to look upon, a product of cities and a trifle spoiled.
She danced through Europe with Salemina and me, taking in no more information than she could help, but charming everybody that she met. She was only fairly well educated, and such knowledge as she possessed was vague, uncertain, and never ready for instant use. In literature she knew Shakespeare, Balzac, Thackeray, Hawthorne, and Longfellow, but if you had asked her to place Homer, Schiller, Dante, Victor Hugo, James Fenimore Cooper, or Thoreau she couldn’t have done it within a hundred years.
In history she had a bowing acquaintance with Napoleon, Washington, Wellington, Prince Charlie, Henry of Navarre, Paul Revere, and Stonewall Jackson, but as these gallant gentlemen stand on the printed page, so they stood shoulder to shoulder, elbowing one another in her pretty head, made prettier by a wealth of hair, Marcel-waved twice a week.
These facts were brought out once in examination, by one of Francesca’s earliest lovers, who, at Salemina’s request and my own, acted as her tutor during the spring before our first trip abroad, the general idea being to prepare her mind for foreign travel.
I suppose we were older and should have known better than to allow any man under sixty to tutor Francesca in the spring. Anyhow, the season worked its maddest pranks on the pedagogue. He fell in love with his pupil within a few days,—they were warm, delicious, budding days, for it was a very early, verdant, intoxicating spring that produced an unusual crop of romances in our vicinity. Unfortunately the tutor was a scholar at heart, as well as a potential lover, and he interested himself in making psychological investigations of Francesca’s mind. She was perfectly willing, for she always regarded her ignorance as a huge joke, instead of viewing it with shame and embarrassment. What was more natural, when she drove, rode, walked, sailed, danced, and “sat out” to her heart’s content, while more learned young ladies stayed within doors and went to bed at nine o’clock with no vanity-provoking memories to lull them to sleep? The fact that she might not be positive as to whether Dante or Milton wrote “Paradise Lost,” or Palestrina antedated Berlioz, or the Mississippi River ran north and south or east and west,—these trifling uncertainties had never cost her an offer of marriage or the love of a girl friend; so she was perfectly frank and offered no opposition to the investigations of the unhappy but conscientious tutor, meeting his questions with the frankness of a child. Her attitude of mind was the more candid because she suspected the passion of the teacher and knew of no surer way to cure him than to let him know her mind for what it was.
When the staggering record of her ignorance on seven subjects was set down in a green-covered blank book, she awaited the result not only with resignation, but with positive hope; a hope that proved to be ill-founded, for curiously enough the tutor was still in love with her. Salemina was surprised, but I was not. Of course I had to know anatomy in order to paint, but there is more in it than that. In painting the outsides of people I assure you that I learned to guess more of what was inside them than their bony structures! I sketched the tutor while he was examining Francesca and I knew that there were no abysmal depths of ignorance that could appall him where she was concerned. He couldn’t explain the situation at all, himself. If there was anything that he admired and respected in woman, it was a well-stored, logical mind, and three months’ tutoring of Francesca had shown him that her mental machinery was of an obsolete pattern and that it was not even in good working order. He could not believe himself influenced (so he confessed to me) by such trivial things as curling lashes, pink ears, waving hair (he had never heard of Marcel), or mere beauties of colour and line and form. He said he was not so sure about Francesca’s eyes. Eyes like hers, he remarked in confidence, were not beneath the notice of any man, be he President of Harvard University or Master of Balliol College, for they seemed to promise something never once revealed in the green examination book.
“You are quite right,” I answered him; “the green book is not all there is of Miss Monroe, but whatever there is is plainly not for you”; and he humbly agreed with my dictum.
Is it not strange that a man will talk to one woman about the charms of another for days upon days without ever realizing that she may possibly be born for some other purpose than listening to him? For an hour or two, of course, any sympathetic or generous-minded person can be interested in the confidences of a lover; but at the end of weeks or months, during which time he has never once regarded his listener as a human being of the feminine gender, with eyes, nose, and hair in no way inferior to those of his beloved,—at the end of that time he should be shaken, smitten, waked from his dreams, and told in ringing tones that in a tolerably large universe there are probably two women worth looking at, the one about whom he is talking, and the one to whom he is talking!