Mirrors of Life and Love
BY PRINCESS BIBESCO
Daughter of Margot Asquith
LOVE—“Isn’t that what love means, to fill ordinary, commonplace conventional things with magic and significance, not to need the moon and white scent-heavy flowers at night? * * * You talk about love. What a strange, restricted growth it is with you. You don’t know what the real thing means, you who think passion is bad taste because you are not tempted, you to whom the physical side is a degrading extra.” * * * When he was with her now he stammered. He didn’t know that a stammer is the divine eloquence of love.
PASSION—Passion is no respecter of persons. She hardly seems to select her victims. How many a would-be Juliet waits in vain for those consuming fires her heart is longing for, while they blaze in the reluctant hearts of Mr. Adrian Roses, who only ask to be left in peace, far from the ridiculous and, thank God, equally far from the sublime. Are men in love like this:
“She was the first person he had ever loved. He had trembled when he touched her. His spasms of passion had been like spasms of pain, his face contorted and his voice rough, and then there had followed intervals of wretched shyness. When he had thought of possessing her he had become a saint waiting for a divine manifestation.”
MARRIAGE—“We just are hopelessly unsuited to each other. Do you seriously think that you want a wife like me?” * * * “Marriage will modify you.” * * * “Marriage might modify me if I married the right man. Marriage to you would bring out everything you hate.” * * * “Helena, do you realize that I love you?” “You don’t know what love means.” * * * “Of course I don’t. If I did I might want to marry you.”
PROTEST AGAINST REALISM—“What is it one yearns for? It is to be able to do a thing for the first time again. And that is impossible. When I love, what do I want? I want never to have kissed, never to have given myself before. It is in vain, I say—‘Never before was I awake—I was a dummy in the hands of fate—now I am alive.’ I was shut up perhaps, but my outer petals were touched. Oh, my God, make me again the child I was—but He cannot answer.”
DISILLUSIONMENT—What are we to tell our children? How are they to know that the first accidental encounter with life may take from them a treasure they will only learn about in forty storm-tossed years? Those first gifts—those shy blossomings lovely in their unconsciousness—are surely but the squandering of something half alive, the foolish murder of a bud. Oh, youth is a wicked, cruel thing, eating miracles with its breakfast and not knowing they are not porridge.
WHAT A WOMAN WANTS—“I don’t want anything except to be wanted. I long for you to make ceaseless, impossible demands on me.”