“That hope is rather remote, isn’t it?”
“Rather. I have another, more immediate. I hope that in the early stages of the counter-revolution our sophisticated sons and daughters will scrutinize ‘the idea of sex,’ coolly extract from it the part that belongs to physiology and pathology; and then disuse the word as synonym for every other element in the complex human relationship which sometimes makes human beings paradisiacally happy in their blossoming season and content enough with each other even into wintry old age. I have some hope that the Emetic School may help our children to understand that sex and sexual self-realization are not, in the long view, the main substance of what youth hungers for.”
“Go on!” cried Cornelia, encouragingly.
“I hope that they will make real progress in psychoanalysis. I hope that, when they feel the ache of the soul’s ultimate solitude and are restless and full of vague desires they may be capable of lucid introspection; that they may be frank and plain with themselves, and call things by their right names, and say to themselves something like this: ‘I am filled with tedium and passionate craving. I shall be hard to satisfy, for I am thirsty for a deep draught of human felicity. What I crave is not described or named in the physiologies. I crave beauty, sympathy, sweetness, incentive, perfume, difference, vivacity, wit, cleanness, grace, devotion, caprice, pride, kindness, blitheness, fortitude. I will not look for these things where I know they cannot be found, nor under conditions in which I know they cannot be maintained. But if I find them, and where they thrive, I shall wish to express my joy by some great act of faith and the hazard of all I hope to be. And I shall not like the town clerk to be the sole recorder of my discovery and my faith. I shall wish witnesses, high witnesses, whatever is august and splendid in the order of the world, to enwheel me round and bid me welcome to that order.’ That is the sort of self-realization to which I hope our sons and daughters are coming.”
Cornelia smiled with a kind of malicious sweetness that she has. She was satisfied. She rather yearned, I perceived well enough, to remark that now at last I was taking the “stand” that she had taken from the first. But Cornelia is one of the few women now living who do not say everything that they yearn to say. She merely released one arrowy smile. Then she rose, as I had done already,—standing, she reminds one of Artemis,—and extending her hand, detained mine with another deep question. She asked me whether I knew any “living reason” to believe that my emancipated young people would return to that ideal.
The opportunity was irresistible.
“Yes,” I said, “I have known you, Cornelia.”
BOOK TWO
AN ELIGIBLE YOUNG MAN
I
CORNELIA’S CHILDREN REACT TO A SUITABLE MATCH
There was a wedding at noon in the village church, a couple of miles from our summer community by the lake, and as most of our colony were somewhat interested in the girl, we turned out in force. It was an outwardly festive and—to my sense—agreeably solemn little affair. There was a bank of lady’s-slippers and maidenhair ferns before the altar, and the air was heavy with the sweetly mortal scent of lilies. The clergyman in white vestments had a full consciousness of the finality of his function. He joined in permanent wedlock a white, smiling, tearful bride of twenty to a well-dressed groom of thirty-five, who looked very experienced, very serious, and slightly bald. Cornelia, who is a connoisseur, whispered to me that it was in every respect a “most suitable match.” I made a mental note to ask her at the next opportunity what the essentials of a suitable match were. I happened, however, to ride away from the ceremony in the rear seat of her car, sandwiched between her two children, Dorothy and Oliver Junior; and their comment was less flattering.