“He’s real cut up,” said the sympathetic Rube, looking commiseratingly after the friend of his bosom. “And all for what? Because a woman never seems certain of her own mind. When judgment overtakes you women what is to become of you all, anyhow—eh, Mell?”
Mell could hardly say; and Rube, dismissing Jerome from his mind for the present, found other occupation. He had never seen Mell before in full dress. He addressed himself con amore, and exclusively, for a time, to the study of structural feminity and those marvels of nature presented to the eye of the earnest investigator, in the shape of a well-formed woman on the outside of a ball dress.
During this process Rube’s sensations were indefinable.
Mell, preoccupied in thoughts of her own, hears, at length, his voice dreamily, as a sound from afar, and looks up irritably to see, for the hundredth time, how coarse of fibre Rube is compared to Jerome.
She resents the unpalatable fact. She resents something else, and makes a very vigorous but unavailing effort to gain her freedom.
“I cannot understand,” playfully remonstrated Rube, and with arms immovable, “why so simple a matter disturbs you so much. You are as 302 white as a sheet, you are quivering like a leaf, your hands are icy cold, and what is it all about?”
“I told you never, never to do that!” cried out Mell, in an agony of passionate protest.
Even the most cold-blooded among mortals finds the caress of a person not dear to them offensive; but take the woman of emotional nature, exquisitely sensitive in all matters of feeling, and to such the touch of unloved lips is worse than a plague spot.
“Don’t you hear me? I cannot bear it! I am not used to it!”
There was something more than maidenly coyness in her tone; there was mental anguish, and a downright shade of anger. We wonder Rube did not detect it. But you know, gentle reader, how it is. There are so many things all around and about us which we do not hear and see, because we are intent upon other matters, and are not looking for them. With such feelings, in that dreadful moment Mell would rather have submitted to a dozen stripes from Jerome, than one single caress from Rube—her future husband, bear you in mind! the being by whose side she expected to pass the rest of her days. Poor Mell! If getting up in the world requires self-torture, self-immolation such as this, wouldn’t it be better, think you, not to get up? Wouldn’t it be better, in the long run, for every woman, situated as you are, to use a dagger, and thereby not only settle her future, but get clean out of a world where such sufferings are necessary? There can’t be any other world much worse, judged by your present sensations.