“Why, a gentleman,” said Cornelia, “is a man so well bred and so intelligent that he knows what I have just been saying, without being told; consequently he doesn’t ask a nice girl to marry him if he is aware that he can offer her nothing but perpetual humiliation. A gentleman is a man whose character has been formed by the standards of civilized and rational people. To him these considerations are so elementary and so familiar that he acts upon them spontaneously.”
“Then you would admit,” I suggested, a little petulantly, “that what a man is, after he is a vestryman, an officer in the militia, and a property-holder, may have a certain remote bearing on—on the felicity of a marriage, if you think that of any importance?”
“Of course I think that of importance,” responded Cornelia. “Don’t be foolish. I am discussing the conditions in which felicity begins to be possible. You recall what Henry James says so beautifully: ‘The object of money is to enable one to forget it.’ In the whole course of my life, I believe I was never before hectored into saying so flatly what the prerequisites of a decent marriage are. But you and your novelist friends—you realists, as you call yourselves—have filled the world with the glorification of merely instinctive and utterly irrational ‘matings,’ or with childish sentimentality about them; so that now, when I talk with Dorothy about suitable and unsuitable marriages, I find myself obliged to reconstruct for her the very rudiments of common-sense.”
I do not consider Cornelia subtle, but sometimes she says the same things that she would say if she were subtle. However, if I was being instructed over the head of her daughter, I did not propose to acknowledge it. “My dear Cornelia,” I remonstrated, “do you forget that I am not Dorothy?”
“No,” she said, “but I often think you are just as sentimental.”
IV
CORNELIA APPRECIATES HER HUSBAND
The old road dips here into a hollow, where an extensive thicket of wild roses encroaches upon it and diminishes it to a narrow and thorny footpath. We picked our way through it single-file and in silence. Cornelia, emerging some steps ahead, turned and waited, waist-high behind the briars, smiling—with a rose in her hand and its hue in her face. Suddenly she seemed a long way off—twenty years off. The breeze had brought youth into her eyes if not into her mind. She was very lovely, and I wished the wind might have loosened a wisp—why couldn’t it?—of her sunlit hair; but that was too much for the wind. Her own arrangements had been complete.
She fixed the rose in my coat.
“Cornelia,” I said, as we footed it again together over the vivid green gloss of dewberry leaves, “You remind me of an old sweetheart of the seventeenth century—who also married a diplomat. I mean Dorothy Osborne. When Temple was courting her, she wrote to him, oh quite delicious letters—one in particular, in which she says she has been crying over the story of Baucis and Philemon. ‘Methinks,’ she says, ‘they were the perfectest characters of a contented marriage, where piety and love were all their wealth, and in their poverty feasted the gods when rich men shut them out.’ But in that identical letter she warns her lover that ‘this is the world; would you and I were out on’t!’ And in the next letter she derides the foolish young people who marry for love, and pointedly reminds poor Temple that all the world must be informed ‘what fortune you have, and upon what terms I marry you—that both may not be made to appear ten times worse than they are.’”
“Yes—yes; I remember,” Cornelia said, with—I thought—a faint note of reverie. “Love and wit met in that encounter, and both came away much improved. I must give that book to my Dorothy. She was a sensible girl—Dorothy Osborne was a very sensible girl. It is a book that will help a young girl to understand that she needn’t be an idiot.”