Yet no one who knows anything of women can have failed to remark that women themselves are even more brutal in this matter. Nothing could exceed the executioner-like promptitude with which a woman will despatch a man for whom she has ceased to care. But in her case there is to be urged that, though fundamentally love is of equal importance to man and woman, it does not so often mean the absolute saving or wrecking of a man's life as it does a woman's. It is not a disgrace to a man to be jilted; it is to a woman. For a woman to be jilted is for her to have failed,--as a woman; and for a woman to have failed as a woman is for her to value no other success.
All this to maintain, in spite of the reader, that Londonderry is no milksop because he is not going to jilt--that is, murder--poor little Jenny, throw up New Zion, and seek his new love on the wild winds. But the agony of it none the less! O Jenny! Jenny! sweet and true and good and dear as ever,--if only you would just take a sudden fancy for someone else!
Meanwhile the months were going by, and the day drawing nearer when, for a brief moment of fire, the orbits of those two separated lives were to touch once more.
What of Isabel during these months? The woman whom God had created for Theophilus Londonderry did not forget her promise to write to the woman whom Theophilus Londonderry had created in his own image. Wonderful letters, of course! Why don't women publish volumes of their letters, as men collect their scattered essays? There is no writing in the world more immediately, conqueringly personal than a really clever woman's letters; and they are not always compromising.
Isabel's letters were the perfection of self-expression. Her handwriting swept across the page just as she would walk down a street, at once eager and yet stately and subtle-rhythmed; the shape of some of the words reminded you of her hats,--hats everyone thought she paid guineas for, but which she made for herself at a cost perhaps of five shillings: hats which were Paris with a touch of fairyland, somewhere an unobtrusive feather of the fantastic, somewhere a personal magic in the inimitable twist or lie of a bow--; her face looked out at you from a g or an x, a gesture flashed back to you in a sudden distinguished stroke of the pen, and her voice was somewhere, everywhere, among the words, like a violin.
Without any apparent literary device she contrived to make you, while you read her letters, do what she was doing, see what she was seeing, and form, as though acted on by some magic property in the words, pictures of all she told you.
One piece of news you would not expect her to have told. I have said that women are both executioners of the tiresome. In this Isabel, I fear, was no exception to her sex. Like most independent girls in London, she had a little theatre-guard of devoted men friends, who took it in turn to companion her to plays or picture-galleries; and these, with admirable tact, she contrived to keep in, to them, the unsatisfactory relation of brothers. One of these, however, had of late been growing dangerously unfraternal. His presents had been growing expensive. Cigarettes and chocolates, and pretty editions, like gloves, and boxes of flowers, are every pretty woman's lawful spoils; but costlier gifts are to be looked on with suspicion. Besides, the doomed man's letters had been growing warmer. Indeed, Isabel remembered with something like a shudder, so soon as she was back in her little room, with its curious pictures and its general sense of exotic refinement, that she had allowed him to kiss her the last time they had been together. The reminiscence decided her. Theophil could never be hers; but at least no facile or mediocre attachments should fill his place. So at once there is posted a letter, as kind as cruelty can make it, and with it go a little ormolu clock, a pair of mother-of-pearl opera-glasses, a lovely fan it was hard, Isabel, to part with,--and there is an end of that.
"Not after Theophil!" she sighed, as she took up her great Persian cat, and, like it, sat gazing into the fire that flickered dreamily among her fantastic possessions,--a mystery gazing idly into a mystery.