So she appeals to the husband she had originally accepted as "a crutch," and who had looked upon her as "furniture." Fortunately—for the children, because he has "changed, broadened in outlook and understanding"—he is ready "to build afresh, stone by stone."
We admit that Mr. Henderson's moral is sound enough; he has, indeed, found "the way of salvation." But he has not drawn for us the "innately decent and fine woman."
Viva is weak and abnormally sensual from the first; pulled out of the mire by luck, human kindness, and a dim taste for "the things that are good, decent, and worth while"; inherited from clean-living forebears.
The danger for her was exceptional, not "that natural yearning" against which "all women must be eternally on their guard." Her husband, we notice, hoped to guard his daughter "against her mother's tendency."
We have a precisely similar situation in The Mother of All Living by Mr. Keable. An emotional, but high-minded woman, whose husband was not aggressively incompatible, is here suddenly stirred to the depths—practically at first sight—by a cynical, handsome man of the world. There is absolutely no attempt whatever to even suggest any natural affinity in mind or tastes between the two; no urge except the unexplained, and inexplicable, mystery of the spark that fires sex. The abandon to which this unnatural awakening leads up belongs to quite a different type of woman; and when, at the eleventh hour, she repents in melodrama, we have still a third personality, no way like the girl her husband wooed and won.
This is, perhaps, why Mr. Keable calls her
The Mother of all Living, Eve incarnate, the World-Woman. As Mr. Masefield draws Mary Queen of Scots—too "big" for one lover. Both writers chose to forget, or to ignore, that love has no meaning, unless one's whole self is expressed.
Mr. Temple Thurston, again, in The Green Bough, seems resolutely determined to uphold Pope's dictum that "every woman is at heart a rake."
Mary, indeed, is a woman "whom life had discarded and thrown aside"; whom, therefore, we are ready to judge leniently. It does not, therefore, follow "How vast a degree of false modesty there is in the world . . . it had all been false that modesty which their mother had taught them."
She, at any rate without modesty, sought and found love. So fine a thing this that she took it, without hesitation, from a married man, who had told her how much he loved his wife. "It happened—in a fortnight."