Sarah's embarrassment was painful and but indifferently concealed. She felt that it was barely excusable, in consideration of his fraternal relation to her, for Philip to speak so plainly of this social blemish; and altogether unpardonable, while he did not, or could not, prevent his wife's participation in the questionable gaieties he assailed so unsparingly. Reply she could not, without implicating Lucy in her reprobation, and he must perceive her difficulty. This was the trouble that lay uppermost. At her heart's core, the uneasy feeling she ever experienced in conversation with him; the stirring of the entombed love, of whose actual death she had horrible misgivings; the incongruous blending of past emotion with present duty, were now aggravated by the enforced acceptance of unmerited praise. Her woman's instinct, her experience as a wife, told her that the cause of the sinful recklessness, the contempt of the true spirit of the marriage tie, was not the fruit merely of the vanity and thirst for adulation, to which it was properly attributed. With the recollection of her own life, the education she had received at home, the hateful, yet even to her independent spirit, resistless decrees of society, there swelled up within her bosom something akin to Philip's bitter cynicism. Under this spur, she spoke.
"And from these signs of the times, you would argue an inherent degeneracy of womanhood—a radical change in its composition, such as some anatomists tell us has taken place in the structure of our bodies—our blood—our very teeth. A dentist, who filled a tooth for me the other day, imparted divers scientific items of information to me that may illustrate your position. 'Enamel, madam, is not what enamel was in the days of our ancestors!' he affirmed pathetically; 'the color, the very ingredients of the bone, the calcareous base of the teeth, differ sadly from the indestructible molars of fifty years ago.' At this passage of his jeremiade, he chanced to touch the nerve in the unhappy 'molar' he was excavating, and I am persuaded that I suffered as really as my grandmother would have done, had she sat in my place."
She paused, and beat time with her fingers on Jeannie's shoulder to the wild, varying waltz that swept the giddy crowd around the room in fast and flying circles.
"Your analogy asserts, then, that at heart women are alike in all ages?"
"Why not, as well as men?"
"Then why does not action remain the same, if that be true?"
"Because custom—fashion, if you prefer this name—an unaccountable, irresponsible power—owing its birth oftenest to accident or caprice, says, 'Do this!' and it is done! be it to perpetrate a cravat-bow, a marriage, or a murder!"
Another pause—in which music and dancers seemed sweeping on to sweet intoxication—so joyous in their abandon were the gushing strains; so swift the whirl of the living ring. The fingers played lightly and rapidly on Jeannie's plump shoulder—then rested on a half-beat.
"Yes!" She was looking towards the crowd, but her eye was fixed, and her accents slow and grave. "Hearts live and hearts love, while time endures. The heart selects its mate in life's springtime, with judgment as untaught as that of the silly bird that asks no companion but the one the God of Nature has bestowed upon it. But you see not, my good brother"—she faced him, a smile wreathing her lip—a strange glitter in her eye—"see you not to what woeful disorders these untrained desires, this unsophisticated following out of unregulated affections would give rise? It would sap the foundations of caste; level all wholesome distinctions of society; consign the accomplished daughters of palatial halls—hoary with a semi-decade of years—to one-story cottages and a maid-of-all work; doom nice young men to the drudgery of business for the remainder of their wretched lives, to maintain wives whose dowries would not keep their lily-handed lords in French kids for a year; cover managing mammas with ignominy, and hasten ambitious papas to their costly vaults in—as Dickens has it—'some genteel place of interment.' Come what may of blasted hopes and wrecked hearts, the decencies of life must be observed. Every heart has its nerve—genuine, sensitive, sometimes vulgarly tenacious of life—but there are corrosives that will eat it out; fine, deadly wires, that can probe and torture and extract it. And when the troublesome thing is finally gotten rid of, there is an end to all obstacles to judicious courtships and eligible alliances!" She laughed scornfully, and Philip recoiled, without knowing why he did so, as he heard her.
"That is all very well, when the nature of the contract is understood on both sides," he said, gloomily. "I doubt, however, whether the beautiful economy of your system will be appreciated by those whose living hearts are bound to the bloodless plaster-casts you describe."