“Nothing!” she said, with a kind of hopeless gesture—“I assure you, absolutely nothing! I cannot feel. I am one of your modern women,—I can only think,—and analyse.”
“Think and analyse as much as you will, my queen,”—I answered playfully—“if you will only think you can be happy with me. That is all I desire.”
“Can you be happy with me?” she asked—“Wait—do not answer for a moment, till I tell you what I am. You are altogether mistaken in me.” She was silent for some minutes, and I watched her anxiously. “I was always intended for this”—she said slowly at last,—“this, to which I have now come,—to be the property of a rich man. Many men have looked at me with a view to purchase, but they could not pay the price my father demanded. Pray do not look so distressed!—what I say is quite true and quite commonplace,—all the women of the upper classes,—the [p 201] unmarried ones,—are for sale now in England as utterly as the Circassian girls in a barbarian slave-market. I see you wish to protest, and assure me of your devotion,—but there is no need of this,—I am quite sure you love me,—as much as any man can love,—and I am content. But you do not know me really,—you are attracted by my face and form,—and you admire my youth and innocence, which you think I possess. But I am not young—I am old in heart and feeling. I was young for a little while at Willowsmere, when I lived among flowers and birds and all the trustful honest creatures of the woods and fields,—but one season in town was sufficient to kill my youth in me,—one season of dinners and balls, and—fashionable novel-reading. Now you have written a book, and therefore you must know something about the duties of authorship,—of the serious and even terrible responsibility writers incur when they send out to the world books full of pernicious and poisonous suggestion to contaminate the minds that have hitherto been clean and undiseased. Your book has a noble motive; and for this I admire it in many parts, though to me it is not as convincing as it might have been. It is well written too; but I gained the impression while reading it, that you were not altogether sincere yourself in the thoughts you strove to inculcate,—and that therefore you just missed what you should have gained.”
“I am sure you are right,”—I said, with a wholesome pang of humiliation—“The book is worthless as literature,—it is only the ‘boom’ of a season!”
“At any rate,”—she went on, her eyes darkening with the intensity of her feeling—“you have not polluted your pen with the vileness common to many of the authors of the day. I ask you, do you think a girl can read the books that are now freely published, and that her silly society friends tell her to read,—‘because it is so dreadfully queer!’—and yet remain unspoilt and innocent? Books that go into the details of the lives of outcasts?—that explain and analyse the secret vices of men?—that advocate almost as a sacred [p 202] duty ‘free love’ and universal polygamy?—that see no shame in introducing into the circles of good wives and pure-minded girls, a heroine who boldly seeks out a man, any man, in order that she may have a child by him, without the ‘degradation’ of marrying him? I have read all those books,—and what can you expect of me? Not innocence, surely! I despise men,—I despise my own sex,—I loathe myself for being a woman! You wonder at my fanaticism for Mavis Clare,—it is only because for a time her books give me back my self-respect, and make me see humanity in a nobler light,—because she restores to me, if only for an hour, a kind of glimmering belief in God, so that my mind feels refreshed and cleansed. All the same, you must not look upon me as an innocent young girl Geoffrey,—a girl such as the great poets idealized and sang of,—I am a contaminated creature, trained to perfection in the lax morals and prurient literature of my day.”
I looked at her in silence, pained, startled, and with a sense of shock, as though something indefinably pure and precious had crumbled into dust at my feet. She rose and began pacing the room restlessly, moving to and fro with a slow yet fierce grace that reminded me against my wish and will of the movement of some imprisoned and savage beast of prey.
“You shall not be deceived in me,”—she said, pausing a moment and eyeing me sombrely—“If you marry me, you must do so with a full realization of the choice you make. For with such wealth as yours, you can of course wed any woman you fancy. I do not say you could find a girl better than I am; I do not think you could in my ‘set,’ because we are all alike,—all tarred with the same brush, and filled with the same merely sensual and materialistic views of life and its responsibilities as the admired heroines of the ‘society’ novels we read. Away in the provinces, among the middle classes it is possible you might discover a really good girl of the purest blush-rose innocence,—but then you might also find her stupid and unentertaining, and you would not care for that. My chief recommendation is that [p 203] I am beautiful,—you can see that; everybody can see that,—and I am not so affected as to pretend to be unconscious of the fact. There is no sham about my external appearance; my hair is not a wig,—my complexion is natural,—my figure is not the result of the corset-maker’s art,—my eyebrows and eyelashes are undyed. Oh yes,—you can be sure that the beauty of my body is quite genuine!—but it is not the outward expression of an equally beautiful soul. And this is what I want you to understand. I am passionate, resentful, impetuous,—frequently unsympathetic, and inclined to morbidness and melancholy, and I confess I have imbibed, consciously or unconsciously, that complete contempt of life and disbelief in a God, which is the chief theme of nearly all the social teachings of the time.”
She ceased,—and I gazed at her with an odd sense of mingled worship and disillusion, even as a barbarian might gaze at an idol whom he still loved, but whom he could no longer believe in as divine. Yet what she said was in no way contrary to my own theories,—how then could I complain? I did not believe in a God; why should I inconsistently feel regret that she shared my unbelief? I had involuntarily clung to the old-fashioned idea that religious faith was a sacred duty in womanhood; I was not able to offer any reason for this notion, unless it was the romantic fancy of having a good woman to pray for one, if one had no time and less inclination to pray for one’s self. However, it was evident Sibyl was ‘advanced’ enough to do without superstitious observances; she would never pray for me;—and if we had children, she would never teach them to make their first tender appeals to Heaven for my sake or hers. I smothered a slight sigh, and was about to speak, when she came up to me and laid her two hands on my shoulders. “You look unhappy, Geoffrey,”—she said in gentler accents—“Be consoled!—it is not too late for you to change your mind!”
I met the questioning glance of her eyes,—beautiful, lustrous eyes as clear and pure as light itself.
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“I shall never change, Sibyl,” I answered—“I love you,—I shall always love you. But I wish you would not analyse yourself so pitilessly,—you have such strange ideas—”