“Lacking him, what could be returned to her? Her hands went cold and her mouth dry as she faced such a prospect.
“The youth who was hers. Who had no terrors for her! Who was her equal in years and frolic! She could laugh with him and at him. She could chide him and love him. She could give to him and withhold. She could be his mother as well as his wife. She could annoy him and forgive him. For between them there was such an equality of time and rights that neither could dream of mastery or feel a grief against the other. He was her beloved, her comrade, the very red of her heart, and her choice choice.”
BOOK THREE
TREATING OF MODERN GIRLS
I
THE EDUCATION OF DAUGHTERS
I have always looked with admiring astonishment on parents who have daughters on their minds, and yet are not broken by the responsibility; and next to the weight of immediate responsibility for a daughter I should place the burden, which some mothers still take upon themselves, of choosing a daughter-in-law. In my callous moods, I say that the ordinary run of children make as good matches for themselves as they deserve, and that they had better be left to their own devices. But if I were a parent and had successfully brought up to the “magnetic age” two such delightful children as Cornelia’s, I suspect that I myself shouldn’t be able to resist attempting to be a Providence to them. Over a daughter, especially, I suppose I should make a particular fool of myself. I should probably try to keep her for the most part like a bird-of-paradise in a cage, and when I let her out, should endeavor to control her flight by “a thread of my own heart’s weaving.” And I am positive that any youth who presented himself as a candidate for her hand would, unless he were the possessor of incredible perfections, have desperate difficulty in winning mine.
I did feel reasonably competent, nevertheless, to discuss eligible sons-in-law with Cornelia. The young men of to-day are not notably better or worse than the young men of twenty years ago, nor is the problem of choice among them essentially altered. I know a good man when I see him, as well as Cornelia does. But what is a good daughter or a good daughter-in-law nowadays? It is a horrid question. It leads one into the hot air of clashing ideals.
With respect to girls, I admit at once that I am in a state of confusion and uncertainty, and that I may appear to be in a place where the light is dim, not merely because girls, between the period of George Sand and the period of Miss Amy Lowell, are said to have changed rapidly and essentially, but also because in the vast and engrossing literature of this subject I have remained homo unius libri, a man of one book—of strictly limited experience. As I remarked to Cornelia in all humility, only a day or two ago, if there is one thing of which I am more densely ignorant than another, it is women, including girls. If I were suddenly called upon to indicate to a son my notion of the ideal woman for a lifelong companion, I fear that I should not get beyond faltering forth a vague and most likely quite unpersuasive description of the virtues of Cornelia; and he, if he were as acute as I should like a son of my own to be, would doubtless inform me that it isn’t the virtues of Cornelia that take me, but her charm, which I don’t understand. At any rate, my personal curiosity was so happily and completely arrested by my first discovery of perfection that, in the twenty years which have elapsed since that time, I have never felt impelled to explore any further.
I recall, for example, that when a few years ago I visited England in order to look up the baptismal record of an Elizabethan lawyer, I met on shipboard a vivacious young Frenchwoman who had compassion on my obviously lonely state and proposed one day that we make a couple of constitutional turns around the deck. At the end of the first turn, during which I had dallied a bit with the weather in my ingenious American fashion, she shrugged her shoulders—that is, I suppose she did, for she was very French—and exclaimed, “Allons donc, causons de la femme (Well, now, let’s talk about women)!” I had read somewhere or other that Frenchwomen excel in the light discussion of serious themes and general ideas; and if she had proposed that we discuss palæography or epigraphy, I should have been delighted to observe how French feminine wit handles such subjects. But in the face of the topic proposed, I was aghast. I had no intention of talking Cornelia over with a perfect stranger; and feigning dizziness from the motion of the ship, I rather abruptly “saved myself,” as the French say, and went below.
It is, curiously enough, Cornelia herself who in these later years is driving me to reopen the subject, investigate it, and “take a stand.” I haven’t, till lately, felt myself to be in an uncertain position or in a dim light, but rather in a very certain position and at the radiant centre of light. I don’t wish to change my stand. Neither, of course, does she wish me to change it. Yet, if I alter, her own inflexibility will have been the prime mover.
It comes about in this way: she goes into the country as religious people go into a retreat—to escape from dusty contacts with the bustling democratic world, to collect her soul, to fortify her principles, and to renew her vows of allegiance to the conceptions of the good and the beautiful which she inherits from several generations of ancestors accustomed to giving the tone to the society in which they lived. It is utterly impossible to think of Cornelia at present as a grande dame—she is too young, there is too much of the morning clinging to her; and I cannot bear to dwell on the possibility of its ever deserting her; yet in the treasonable hours of the imagination I do occasionally steal forward on the straight highway of time, and I can see that, thirty years hence, if she holds her course, if she fulfills her destiny, she will be a beautiful and proud old lady, still giving the law to her children and to her grandchildren—what people call a grande dame.