Good-night, my sacred old Father! If I don’t see you again—farewell! A blessed farewell. Your William.[[16]]
Usually this feeling is not so profound, as shown in these examples, and may be just sufficient to use as a tool and a play interest. But even then the life may be so schematized that it plays the main rôle. Document No. 14 is a single item taken from an autobiography of over three hundred closely written pages in which practically the only type of wish expressed is the desire for response from men, but this wish is never very strong.
14. At Wichita I went to school till I was about sixteen. Between ten and sixteen I had lots of little sweethearts. I have never been able to be happy without an atmosphere of love or at least flirtation. To such a degree is this true that I fear this story will be little else than the record of my loves and flirtations, happy and unhappy. I liked to kiss little boys from the start, but never cared to kiss the girls. I have had many women pals all through my life, but I never cared to kiss them, as many girls do. I suppose I am what my friend the newspaper man calls a man’s woman. Certainly I am miserable unless there is a man around, and I generally want several. Until recently I have always been in love with two at the same time. But somehow since I met Harry it is different. My love for the other sex was always of an innocent kind. I loved men as the birds love sunshine. It is not a passion, but a necessity, like the air. I am light-hearted and buoyant by nature, and never thought of doing wrong. And yet the ugly side of this passion has always been forced upon me.[[17]]
In many girls the awakening of love and its fixation on an object is slow or incomplete. The girl in the following example is cold as a stone toward everything but herself. Her affection is turned inward. She is the type called narcissistic, in love with herself, like the mythical Narcissus. Probably the appearance of a child will extrovert her feeling to some extent.
15. I have a sister of sixteen, very beautiful and proud of herself. She is of the type who care only for themselves. She would drown her parents, brothers and sisters in a spoon of water if she could only gain something by it, and without suffering the slightest remorse. Besides, she is very obstinate and must have her own way regardless of anything.... But my father and mother and the rest of the family wished her to possess the ordinary school education, so that her ignorance might not be an impediment in her future life, so we put our efforts together and sent her to business school, and thank God she managed somehow to finish the course.
Well, she is now working for the past six months. She has a very good position with a large firm and earns $20 a week. Out of this, mother does not get even a cent, though she sleeps and boards at home. Moreover, she borrows money from mother whenever she can but she never repays it. As if this were not enough trouble, she acts very improperly toward the whole family. She possesses absolutely no sense of shame nor sense of pity and behaves like a wild person in the house; she scolds and shouts and is especially cruel to our younger sisters and brothers.[[18]]
And in certain characters, almost invariably men, the desire for response is barely sufficient to keep them in contact with or on the fringe of humanity.
16. Many a man leads in London a most solitary, unsociable life, who yet would find it hard to live far away from the thronged city. Such men are like Mr. Galton’s oxen, unsociable but gregarious; and they illustrate the fact that sociability, although it has the gregarious instinct at its foundation, is a more complex, more highly developed, tendency. As an element of this more complex tendency to sociability, the instinct largely determines the form of the recreations of even the cultured classes, and is the root of no small part of the pleasure we find in attendance at the theatre, at concerts, lectures, and all such entertainments.[[19]]
Frequently in marriage the wife provides the main fund of response and the husband is assimilated to the child. In No. 17 the wife has had a love adventure, is living with another man, but is planning to visit her husband clandestinely and look after him a bit.
17. My Own Dear Dean: So you would like to know if I am happy. Well, dear, that is one thing that will never be in my life again. It has gone from me forever. I don’t want you to think that Clarence is not good to me, for he could not be better—I have a nice home that he has bought, and chickens and a lovely garden, and if Marjorie was his very own he could not be better to her. But he is terribly jealous, and it makes it very hard for me, for, God knows, I never give him cause. Oh, Dean, dear, wait until you see how I have changed. If I could only live my life over it would be so different....