And so she goes on for as long as you like. She has been everywhere. She has known quantities of out-of-the-way people. She is ready at every turn with a fresh story, an apposite bit of experience, and darts in an instant from the perfect mimicry of a popular vicar we know, who preaches in lavender kids, and leaving his cure of souls for a month's holiday, pathetically from the pulpit entreats our Lord to look after his charge until its proper shepherd returns, to some speculation concerning personal accountability, an annunciation of the reasonableness of purgatory, and wondering as to its various forms of discipline for individual souls, or to dwell on minute phases of the preservation of identity, distinctive and original character after death, etc., and manifests altogether such an at-homeness with the unseen world that, listening to her, I half expect phantom eyes will look into mine if I glance back over either shoulder, bodiless somethings start forward from dusky corners, the very sweep of my own drawing-room curtains gets eerie, a what-not or a tabouret becomes a tripod, my unsubstantial small guest is a priestess—and I'm glad when Ronayne's voice breaks in, "All in the dark, the fire at its last coal, no tea or coffee. Mrs. Stainton, you're a syren!"
Her own little sitting-room in the associate house is as heterogeneous as herself—the room lined with soft comforts, the air heavy with the fragrance of a profusion of flowers, the room's mistress nearly lost in the capaciousness of a most luxurious lounging chair, her table piled with ascetic literature; and in this chamber I encountered the other day the very oddest of all the peculiar people to whom my friendship for "little Malaise" has introduced me—a Miss Beauclerc, a short, stout, dark, coarse-skinned woman of fifty odd, hair cropped close, and an obstinate, honest, horse face.
She was exhibiting her own "spirit drawings"—mad scaramouches, things like designs for eastern embroidery, accurate representations of various portions of the kingdom of heaven, she assured me, and a quantity of utterly purposeless collections of strokes and dots, to which she gave names that would have been blasphemous in any but a lunatic's mouth. How she explained them! How fondly she looked at them! and what anguish she told me she endured lest they should be injured, or perish in some unworthy way. This woman believes herself to be the spirit bride of ——! Can you fancy it? one of the most fervent, poetic, spiritual, gifted of all Anglican divines. She says that since his death he has been constantly near her. She sees him often, leads the life he prescribes, making and shunning acquaintances at his direction, going from place to place, crossing the ocean twice even at his pleasure. Finally she showed a photograph—the faithfulest possible presentment of her own unideal face and person, with, floating above, arms extended in protecting angel guise, a mistily outlined, veiled figure surmounted by the refined, beautiful face known to everybody in the later editions of his poems, and in the windows of church bookshops—the poor clergyman who is allowed to rest neither in his grave nor in any unknown country beyond. It is hard for him, hard for Mrs. ——, were she to hear of this post-mortem masquerading and "affinity," hard for the deluded woman who wanders about the world alone with her crazy fancies, repudiated by her kindred, and plundered by the brigandish among her co-believers.
Here, too, I met again the tall, thin young lady, heroine of the device for frightening small bores—the Plymouth Sister's daughter. We talked of a good many things, but chiefly of marriage, and the position of unmarried women in England. The girl was as simply frank as a child. Matrimony, and matrimony alone, offered any career to women in England. And upon Mrs. Stainton's saying that despite her own perfect marriage—a marriage for love, and the union so entire that there lurked no shadowy region in her soul of which she could not make her husband as free as herself to enter—yet all that she had seen of life made her feel sure that, beyond a few rare exceptions, it mattered not, ten years after marriage, whether the match had been for love solely, or arranged, or a mariage de convenance, the girl assented; somewhat bitterly remarked that ideals were very well for a heroic life, but terrible drawbacks in the world of to-day, and that any woman would do better for herself to accept any reasonably suitable offer than to cling to an impossible dream, or insist upon a great amount of sentiment. "It ought to be enough," said this girl of the period, "for a woman to be able to decently respect a man who has the means of placing her in such conditions as she thinks will suit her. And men do very well without sentiment. They have their professions, their business, their friends, their clubs. It is quite enough for them if their wives are fairly good housekeepers and mothers, presentable at head of their tables, pleasant hostesses in their drawing-rooms. It sounds very mean, but what is a girl to do? We may be most of us clever enough and tolerably well educated, but there are not among us many brilliant geniuses who can find all comfort and happiness in a life devoted, wholly to art or literature. What is one of the mediocre mass to do? It's not genteel to do this, it's unfeminine to do that; one can't stir in any direction that would have in it some spirit, some earnest, something worth while.
"You can always do good, they tell us. I dare say; so can men; but how many among them would like to be recommended, as life occupation, to go making impertinent raids into poor people's houses to tell them they're untidy, when a family has but one room to live in, and there's but one water tap in the court, and two or three flights of stairs over which to carry every drop; or that they're ill-smelling, and will have fever, when an open drain and the dust bin are lodged just under the window, and somebody's great high wall cuts off every ray of sunshine; or that they don't know how to manage because they fare ill, when a half dozen people must keep life in them and some covering on them on fifteen shillings a week? Oh, I'm sick of it all! Look at mamma! She lives in jails, up alleys, in soup kitchens and dispensaries, and we girls cut out and make up flannels, and knew about relief tickets before we could speak, and it's all just pouring water into a sieve! Mamma's always in agonies about some protégée she's placed somewhere, who has absconded with the family plate and wardrobe. Her people are always getting drunk, fighting, or cheating her in some monstrous way. Her nicest girls run off with a strolling theatre company, or to dance in the ballet. There's no end to her miseries, and the people she spends her whole time, strength, and all the money she can spare and beg upon are not really much better off in the end. But even if they were? Mamma is mamma, and I am myself, and we're differing stars. No, I stick to my text. To be only a commonly contented married woman, with the shelter and freedom of a wife's position, with a house to keep, children and servants to look after, and with a certain amount of social influence, is better than to subside into a grim or fidgetty old maid in lodgings, with a dog and three-volume novels to get through the days and years with; to be snubbed and sneered at by men; to have, when one's hair is white as time can make it, the privilege of walking meekly out to dinner behind one's grand niece, a silly chit of eighteen, married a twelvemonth—and nobody to care whether one lives or dies, unless perhaps a Bath chair man.
"Matrimony's the only career for women in England, but we ought to be trained for it on Gradgrind principles. As it is, we're far too æsthetic and sentimental for the mates we must have—if any. Poetry and the stories of fine, gracious, self-sacrificing lives ought to be suppressed; they're ruinous reading for this nineteenth century." And so on and on.
"There's reason for that poor girl's bitterness," said Mrs. Stainton when we were again alone. "A dozen years ago, in her first and second seasons out, a more charming creature it would have been hard to find—ingenuous, sunny tempered, a dashing, sparkling blonde beauty, full of Irish quickness and fun, and a favorite wherever she went. Unluckily she met Ward Cotterell—now one of the editors of 'The Phare'—then a radiant, double first, handsome, chivalric, but as poor and debt-laden as he was clever, and the pair fell desperately in love. Mrs. Dixon wouldn't let them call themselves engaged. She had crippled her own fortune, and Kate had sacrificed a great part of her own portion, to clear a spendthrift eldest son and brother of his difficulties, and start him afresh in Ceylon, so that aid on their part was impossible, and Cotterell, after a year or so's trying vainly in this and that direction, for an income, gave up the struggle, married an heiress, who paid his debts, brought him £40,000 then, and has inherited since £60,000, and within six months after his marriage had his place on the 'Phare' offered him, with a salary of £1,200 a year. 'What would I not have given a year ago for any sort of hard work that would have made me sure of £500 a year?' he said to some friend who knew the little story.
"Poor Kate kept up pretty well. 'What else could he do?' she always says. 'He had no income, and mine would have barely given us shelter.' But she refused offer after offer for years. Now, when she finds admiration less freely forthcoming, and is utterly weary of everything she has tried, or believes is in store for her, I dare say she fancies she regrets the lost chances, but she's too genuine to make a mariage de convenance, let her talk as cynically as she will.
"As for Cotterell, he hasn't a money anxiety in the world, and is reckoned one of the most brilliant leader writers in London; but his wife is the most commonplace woman alive—no more a companion to him than a housemaid would be; and Cotterell's not one of the clever men who like women to be pillows, and pillows only. He has given up society, save that of men, almost entirely; lives in his study and his room in the 'Phare' building, and his talk, when one meets him, is a mixture of fatalism and wormwood, depressing to the last degree. No hero he, and yet his fate has plenty of compensations that Kate's lacks—power, work, and two or three children that have inherited his wit as well as his handsome looks.
"Oh, what a world it is!—a world of infinite pettinesses. I'm dreadfully poor and cowardly myself, but I've always had the greatest reverence for the gift of immortality, and I used to think if I could have chosen, I would have been born and then have died directly. But now that I believe unbaptized babies and people whose goodness, however perfect, is only natural, will have, in another existence, but natural beatitude, and as such a state wouldn't at all satisfy me for an eternity, I should have to tarry long enough to be baptized, and after that one can't wish to run away directly from the foes one has just promised to war against. A soul is such a responsibility, and is always thrusting in to complicate and confuse matters!