“Browning, of course. I ought not to be surprised that the prince of poets should be clever enough to know that. It is from his own experience. ‘Who writes to himself, writes to an eternal public.’ You see, Ruth, men can’t help looking at the question from the other side, because they form the other side. You might cram a woman’s head with all the wisdom of the ages, and while it would frighten every man who came near her into hysterics, it wouldn’t keep her from going down abjectly before some man who had sense enough to know that higher education does not rob a woman of her womanliness. Depend upon it, Ruth, when it does, she would have been unwomanly and masculine if she hadn’t been able to read. And it is the man who marries a woman of brains who is going to get the most out of this life.”
“Men don’t want clever wives,” I said feebly.
“Clever men don’t. Why is it that all the brightest men we know have selected girls who looked pretty and have coddled them? Look at Bronson and Flossy. That man is lonesome, I tell you, Ruth. He actually hungers and thirsts for his intellectual and moral affinity, and yet even he did not have the sense—the astuteness—to select a wife who would have stood at his side, instead of one who lay in a wad at his feet. Oh, the bungling marriages that we see! I believe one reason is that like seldom marries like. For my part I do not believe in the marriage of opposites. Look at Robert Browning and his wife. That is my ideal marriage. Their art and brains were married, as well as their hands and hearts. It is pure music to think of it. And, to me, the most pathetic poem in the English language is Browning’s ‘Andrea del Sarto.’”
“Isn’t it strange to see the kind of men who love clever women like you? You never could have brought yourself to marry any of them, expecting to find them congenial. They would have admired you in dumb silence, until they grew tired of feeling your superiority; after that—what?”
“The deluge, I suppose. Ruth, I don’t see how a woman with any self-respect can marry until she meets her master. That is high treason, isn’t it? But it is one of those sentient bits of truth which we never mention in society. The man I marry must have a stronger will and a greater brain than I have, or I should rule him. I’ll never marry until I find a man who knows more than I do. Yet, as to these other men who have loved me—you know what a tender place a woman has in her heart for the men who have wanted to marry her. My intellect repudiated, but my heart cherishes them still. Odd things, hearts. Sometimes I wish we didn’t have any when they ache so. I feel like disagreeing with all the poets to-day, because they will not say what I believe. Do you remember this, from Beaumont and Fletcher,
“‘Of all the paths that lead to woman’s love
Pity’s the straightest’?
“Men are fond of saying that, I notice, but I don’t think we women bear out the truth. I couldn’t love a man I pitied. I could love one I was proud of, or afraid of, but one I pitied? Never. It is more true to say it of men. I believe plenty of girls obtain husbands by virtue of their weakness, their loneliness, their helplessness, their—anything which makes a man pity them. Pleasant thought, isn’t it, for a woman who loves her own sex and wishes it held its head up better! You may say that it is this sort who receive more of the attentions that women love, chivalry and tenderness and devotion. But if all or any of these were inspired by pity, I’d rather not have them. I would rather a man would be rough and brusque with me, if he loved me heroically, than to see him fling his coat in the mud for me to step on, because he pitied my weakness. Do you know, Ruth, I think men are a good deal more human than women. You can work them out by algebra (for they never have more than one unknown quantity, and in the woman problem there would be more x’s than anything else), and you can go by rules and get the answer. But nothing ever calculated or evolved can get the final answer to one woman—though they do say she is fond of the last word! We understand ourselves intuitively, and we understand men by study, yet we are made the receivers, not the givers; the chosen, not the choosers. It really is an absurd dispensation when you view it apart from sentiment, yet I, for one, would not have it changed. I should not mind being Cupid for a while, though, and giving him a few ideas in the mating line.
“I think women are often misjudged. Men seem to think that all we want is to be loved. Now, it isn’t all that I want. If I had to choose between being loved by a man—the man, let us say—and not loving him at all, or loving him very dearly and not being loved by him, I would choose the latter, for I think that more happiness comes from loving than from being loved.”
“Why don’t you marry somebody?” I asked in an agony of entreaty, for fear all of this would be wasted on me, an Old Maid, rather than upon some man. She shook her head.
“It needs a compelling, not a persuasive, power to win a woman. No man who takes me like this,” closing her thumb and forefinger as if holding a butterfly, “can have me. The one who dares to take me like this,” clenching her hand, “will get me. But he will not come.”