Then I walked with her to the door, and she bent over me, and whispered something about my being a “blessed comfort” to her, and went away. Ah, Tabby, my dear, it is worth while being an Old Maid to be a blessed comfort to anybody. But I would just like to ask you, as a cat of intelligence, what in the world I did for her!
Imagine some man making that girl care for him so much. For, of course, it is somebody. A girl does not say such things about the abstract man.
I was in an uplifted state of mind all day, as I am always after a talk with Rachel, and when Percival came in the evening, I felt that I could deluge him with my gathered sentiment, and he would be receptive. Besides, Percival has a positive genius for understanding. I did not know it, however, this morning. I seldom know as much in the morning as I do at night.
Percival approves of sentiment. He said once that a life which had principle and sentiment needed little else, for principle was to stand upon, and sentiment was to beautify with. He said this after I had told him rather apologetically that I wished there was more sentiment in the world, because I liked it. Is it strange that I like Percival? You can’t help admiring people who approve of you.
Percival is a genius. People in general do not recognize this fact. He is an inarticulate genius. Men feel that he is in some occult way different from them, yet they do not know just how. Nor will they ever take the trouble to study out a problem in human nature, either in man or woman, unless they are philosophers.
Women care for Percival in proportion to their intuitions. You must comprehend him synthetically. You cannot dissect him. With generous appreciation and sympathetic encouragement, Percival’s genius would become articulate. To discover it he must needs marry—but he must wait for the hundredth woman. This, of course, he will not do. If he can find a Flossy, he will go down on his knees to her, when she ought to be on hers to him; metaphorical knees, in this case.
I am very much afraid he has found her. He is in love. You can always tell when a man is in love, Tabby, especially if he is not the lovering kind and has never been troubled in that way before. The best kind of love has to be so intuitive that it often is grandly, heroically awkward. Depend upon it, Tabby, a man who is dainty and pretty and unspeakably smooth when he makes love to you, has had altogether too much practice.
Percival knows that he is in love—that is one great step in the right direction. But he is in that first partly alarmed, partly curious frame of mind that a man would be in who touched his broken arm for the first time to see how much it hurt. Whoever she is, he loves her deeply and thinks she never can care for him. He did not tell me this. If he thought that I knew it, he would wonder how in the world I found it out. Women are born lovers. They have to do the bulk of the loving all through the world. I told Percival so. At first he seemed surprised; then he said that it was true. I believe some men could go through life without loving anybody on earth. But the woman never lived who could do it. A woman must love something—even if she hasn’t anything better to love than a pug-dog or herself.
“Why aren’t women the choosers?” said Percival seriously. The same question twice in one day, Tabby. “Whenever I think of understanding the question of love, I wish for a woman’s intuitions. Women know so much about it. They absorb the whole question at a glance. But, with so many different kinds of women, how is a man to know anything?”
I always liked Percival, but a woman never likes a man so well as when he acknowledges his helplessness in her particular line of knowledge, and throws himself on her mercy. Mentally, I at once began to feel motherly towards Percival, and clucked around him like an old hen. He went on to say that men often are not so blind that they cannot see the prejudices and complexities of a woman’s nature, but they are not constituted to understand them by intuition as women understand men. “The masculine mind,” he said, “is but ill-attuned to the subtle harmonies of the feminine heart.”