Papa's own girl: A novel

by Marie Stevens Howland

“I have long given up hoping for a reconciliation,” said Charlotte, “though it would be a great comfort to me. When he marries Ella, I shall quit the house, though where I shall go is uncertain. Maybe,” she added, smiling, “I shall yet go to live in that Oakdale Social Palace. Nothing would irritate Albert so much, for he hates the count, though it would be difficult to say why. I have always been deeply attached to him. He is the most honorable man toward women I have ever met, and the charm in his friendship is, that he never misunderstands you. This is why his friendship is better than the love of ordinary men.”

During the conversation Clara asked her if she thought Ella really loved Albert.

“No,” said Miss Charlotte, decidedly. “She is too selfish to know what love means; but in her way she is fond of him, and will keep her empire over him, by her coquetry with other men, principally. You lost your power over him simply by loving him with too much devotion. He fretted a good deal at first because you did not return to him. I told him you would never return, for you had ceased to love him. Upon that he showed me your letters. He could not bear any one to think him incapable of doing just what he pleased with you. Those were the first genuine love-letters I ever saw. I cried over them like a child; and my deeper esteem for you dates from that time. They showed so unmistakably that you cared nothing for Albert’s position or wealth. I had not counted on so high a virtue, and could not understand why he should be so worshipped for his gracious self alone; though, of course, he is a very elegant man, and most women find him irresistible.”

Clara was rather silent. She was thinking of Albert’s vanity in showing her passionate letters, simply to prove his power—to say virtually, “You see her heart is under my feet.” There was something so indelicate, so coarse in this, that it almost made her hate the thought of him.

While the ladies lingered over their coffee, Albert was in the library walking up and down, fuming. He had worked himself into a very unenviable state. He had not slept well during the night. It was a new experience to be shut out from this superb woman, who was but a little while ago so caressingly fond of him, so sensitive to his slightest attentions. It was a humiliation that he could not endure with equanimity, and when a little later she entered the library, a scene occurred impossible to describe. Clara, with the fresh information of his engagement to Ella, was amazed at the state he was in. In his anger, he threw off every rag of decent reticence on the subject of his feelings, and said, without shame, that there was no reason why they should deny themselves the pleasure of being together, simply because they were not so ineffably sentimental as they had been. As he spoke, he was conscious of outraging all Clara’s high sense of refinement, and he even enjoyed it as a kind of revenge.

“Stop there! Dr. Delano,” she exclaimed, with furious indignation. “You compel me to despise you utterly. You talk to me of pleasure in what the soul can have no part. Oh, shame! shame! Until now I have never known you. Your peers are not honorable and chaste women, but those who may barter their favors, like merchandise, for wealth or social position.”

“I am a physician,” he said, “and don’t pretend to understand so much about soul as you do. I have found that, as a general thing, men are men, and women are women. The natural functions exist, and demand their natural play quite independent of any bosh about soul.”

Clara was never so amazed in her life. She was too excited to move from the spot, and she gave vent to her horror of his baseness in most unmeasured terms, ending a volley of eloquence with a fervent expression of gratitude that there had been no children to perpetuate such moral degradation.

“Children?” he sneered. “You need not count on their advent in your case, under any circumstances. Children are born of the body, not of the soul, or you might be the mother of an army of phantoms—the only kind you will ever have. That I can promise you as a physician.”

“I despise your wisdom as a physician,” retorted Clara, her face crimson. “You should have only brutes for patients. Children, in my opinion, are not well born, who are not the offspring of the soul as well as of the body. I have not the slightest fear that, if I should ever—.” Clara stopped short, angry with herself that she should lower herself to answer at all.