Of bold Sir Lancelot.”
Her face was serious,—calmly contemplative,—but to herself she could not admit any positive change. Perhaps the slightest suggestion of more softness and roundness in the outline of the cheeks and an added brightness in the eyes might be perceived,—but this kind of improvement, as she knew, happened often as a temporary effect of something in the atmosphere, or of a happier condition of mind, and was apt to vanish as rapidly as it occurred. Still looking at herself with critical inquisitiveness, she slipped out of her pale blue gown and stood revealed in an unbecoming gauntness of petticoat and camisole,—so gaunt and crude in her own opinion that she hastened to pull the pins out of her hair, so that its waving brightness might fall over her scraggy shoulders and flat chest and hide the unfeminine hardness of these proportions. Then, with a deep sigh, she picked up her gown from the floor where she had let it fall, shook out its folds and hung it up in the wardrobe.
“It’s all nonsense!” she said. “I’m just the same thin old thing as ever! What difference Madame Dimitrius can see in me is a mystery! And he——”
Here, chancing to turn her head rather quickly from the wardrobe towards the mirror again, she saw the charming profile of—a pretty woman!—a woman with fair skin and a sparkling eye that smiled in opposition to the gravity of rather set lip-lines,—and the suddenness of this apparition gave her quite a nervous start.
“Who is it?” she half whispered to the silence,—then, as she moved her head again and the reflection vanished, “Why, it’s me! I do believe it’s me!”
Amazed, she sat down to think about it. Then, with a hand-glass she tried to recapture the vision, but in vain!—no position in which she now turned gave just the same effect.
“It’s enough to drive one silly!” she said—“I won’t bother myself any more about it. The plain truth is that I’m better in health and happier in mind than I’ve ever been, and of course I look as I feel. Only the dear Madame Dimitrius hasn’t noticed it before—and he?—well, he never notices anything about me except that I do his work well, or well enough to suit him. If his mysterious ‘globule’ had killed me, I wonder whether he would have been really sorry?”
She considered a moment,—then shook her head in a playful negative and smiled incredulously. She finished undressing, and throwing a warm boudoir wrap about her, a pretty garment of pale rose silk lined with white fur which had been a parting gift from her friend Sophy Lansing, and which, as she had declared, was “fit for a princess,” she went into her sitting-room, where there was a cheerful wood fire burning, and sat down to read. Among the several books arranged for her entertainment on a row of shelves within reach of the hand, was one old one bearing the title: “Of the Delusions whereby the Wisest are Deluded”—and the date 1584. Taking this down she opened it haphazard at a chapter headed: “Of the Delusion of Love.” It was written in old style English with many quaint forms of expression, more pointed and pithy than our modern “newspaper slang.”
“How many otherwise sober and sane persons are there,” soliloquised the ancient author—“who nevertheless do pitifully allow themselves to be led astray by this passion, which considered truly, is no more than the animal attraction of male for female, and female for male, no whit higher than that which prevails in the insect and brute world. For call it Love as they will, it is naught but Lust, as low an instinct or habit as that of craving for strong liquor or any wherewithall to still the insatiate demands of uncontrolled appetite. Love hath naught to do with Lust,—for Love is a Principle, not a Passion. For this cause it is comforting to read in Holy Scripture that in Heaven there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage, for there we are as the angels. And to be as the angels implyeth that we shall live in the Principle and not in the Passion. Could we conceive it possible on this earth for such an understanding to be arrived at between two persons of intelligence that they should love each other in this highest sense, then there would be no satiety in their tenderness for one another, and the delicacies of the soul would not be outraged by the coarseness of the body. It is indeed a deplorable and mournful contemplation, that we should be forced to descend from the inexpressible delights of an imagined ideal to the repulsive condition of the material stye, and that the fairest virgin, bred up softly, with no rougher composition of spirit than that of a rose or a lily, should be persuaded by this delusion of ‘love’ to yield her beauties to the deflowering touch which destroys all maidenly reserve, grace and modesty. For the familiarity of married relations doth, as is well known, put an end to all illusions of romance, and doth abase the finest nature to the gross animal level. And though it is assumed to be necessary that generations should be born without stint to fill an already over-filled world, meseemeth the necessity is not so great as it appeareth. Wars, plagues and famines are bred from the unwisdom of over-population, for whereas the over-production of mites in a cheese do rot the cheese, so doth the over-production of human units rot the world. Therefore it is apparent to the sage and profound that while the material and animal portion of the race may very suitably propagate their kind, they having no higher conception of their bodies or their souls, the more intelligent and cleanly minority of purer and finer temperament may possibly find the way to a nobler and more lasting ‘love’ than that which is wrongfully called by such a name,—a love which shall satisfy without satiating, and which shall bind two spirits so harmoniously in one, that from their union shall be born an immortal offspring of such great thoughts and deeds as shall benefit generations unborn and lead the way back to the lost Paradise!”