Lilian Bell

“ II I COME INTO MY KINGDOM
“There is no compensation for the woman who feels that the chief relation of her life has been no more than a mistake. She has lost her crown. The deepest secret of human blessedness has half whispered itself to her and then forever passed her by.”
I have become an Old Maid, and really it is a relief. I feel as if I had left myself behind me, and that now I have a right to the interests of other people when they are freely offered. My friends always have confided in me. I suppose it is because I am receptive. Men tell me their old love affairs. ”

“ The hours at home, which he intended to give to study and research, have been sacrificed to the petting and nursing of a perfectly well woman, who demanded it of him. His home life, where he had dreamed of a congenial atmosphere, where the centripetal force should be the love of wife and children, merged into frequent journeys for Flossy—who would have been happy if she never had been obliged to stay in one place over a week—and a shifting of their one child Rachel into the care of nurses, because Flossy fretted at the care of her and demanded all of Bronson’s time for herself. ”

“ As I looked across at her during that long evening, I felt that it was impertinent to probe her heart with my wonderings and surmises. I knew instinctively just how carefully she was hiding her hurt from all human eyes. I knew how her fierce pride was bearing up under the cruelty of it. I felt how she had rushed from the humiliation one man had brought her to the waiting love of the one who should have been her first choice by the divine right of natural selection. This strong man had loved her for years, but he would never allow her to imperil either his dignity or her own. ”

“ If I were a man, I should be in love with Rachel.
Her sensitiveness through every available channel makes her of no use to general society. Blundering people tread on her; malicious ones tear her to pieces. Rachel ought to be caged, and only approached by clever people who have brains enough to appreciate her. I should like to be her keeper. But her organization is too closely allied to that of genius to be happy, unless with certain environments which it is too good to believe will ever surround her. She is so clever that she is perfectly helpless. ”

“ I do not belittle my love. I know that I loved him with all my heart and soul, and that I gave him more than most women would have done, because love means infinitely more to me than it does to them. I knew all the time that I loved him more than he loved me, but I did not care, for I believed, blind as I was, that we loved each other all we were capable of doing, and if I had more love to give it was only because I was richer than he, and I meant to make him the greater by my treasure. ”

“ Men seem to think that all we want is to be loved. Now, it isn’t all that I want. If I had to choose between being loved by a man—the man, let us say—and not loving him at all, or loving him very dearly and not being loved by him, I would choose the latter, for I think that more happiness comes from loving than from being loved.”
“Why don’t you marry somebody?” I asked in an agony of entreaty, for fear all of this would be wasted on me, an Old Maid, rather than upon some man. She shook her head.
“It needs a compelling, not a persuasive, power to win a woman. ”

“ There are fashions in thought as well as in dress, and the best of us follow both, as sheep follow their leader. We will sometimes follow our neighbor’s line of insular prejudice, when worlds could not bribe us to copy her grammar or her gowns. Dull people admire youth. They excuse its follies; they adore its prettiness. That it is only a period of education, and that real life begins with maturity, does not enter into their minds. The odor of bread and butter does not nauseate them. Dull people, I say—and God pity us, most of us are dull—admire youth. Men love it. ”

“ Now I feel that both I and my love have been wasted. Oh, it was a cruel thing, Ruth. I feel so poor, so poor.”
[Pg 171] “Louise, you think, but you do not think rightly. Are you poorer for having loved him? What is his unworth compared with your worth? Isn’t your love sweeter and truer for having grown and expanded? No love was ever wasted. It enriches the giver involuntarily. You are a sweeter, better woman than before you loved, unless you made the mistake of small natures and let it embitter you. You have no right to feel that it has been wasted.” ”

“ I am very fond of the girl to-night. What a pity it is that everybody does not know her as she really is! No one understands her, and she has flirted so outrageously with most of the men that the girls’ friendship for her is very hollow. A few, of whom Alice Asbury is one, dare to show this quite plainly, and of course Sallie doesn’t like it. She pretends not to care for women’s friendship, but she does. She would love to be friendly with all the girls, but they remember the misery she has made them suffer, and won’t have it. ”

“ I always liked Percival, but a woman never likes a man so well as when he acknowledges his helplessness in her particular line of knowledge, and throws himself on her mercy. Mentally, I at once began to feel motherly towards Percival, and clucked around him like an old hen. He went on to say that men often are not so blind that they cannot see the prejudices and complexities of a woman’s nature, but they are not constituted to understand them by intuition as women understand men. ”

“ Flossy’s tears flow like rain if you crook your finger at her, and tears wring the heart of a man like Bronson. To think he was going to marry her! I just looked at him, I remember, as he stood so straight and tall before me, and said to myself, “Well, you dear, honest, loyal, clever man! You are just the kind of a man that women fool most unmercifully. But it’s nature, and you can’t help it. Go and marry this Flossy girl, and commit mental suicide if you must.” ”

“ Ah, I wish you knew, Charlie Hardy, how all this sounds even to such a good friend of yours as I am. It is such men as you who lower the standard of love and of men in general. Do you suppose a girl who has had an encounter with you, and seen how trifling you are, can have her first beautiful faith to give to the truly grand hero when he comes? ”

“ I thoroughly like the boy, but I can’t imagine myself falling in love with him. If I were married to another man—an indiscreet thing for an Old Maid to say, Tabby, but I only use it for illustration—I should not mind Charlie Hardy’s dropping in for Sunday dinner every week, if he wanted to. He never bothers. He never is in the way. He is as deft at buttoning a glove as he is amiable at playing cards. You always think of Charlie Hardy first if you are making up a theatre party. ”

“ I am glad that a frivolous, shallow-minded, rattle-brained thing like me had sense enough to fall in love with the most glorious man that ever came into her life. I shouldn’t have made him half as good a wife as Rachel does—I really feel as if they were made for each other—but he would have made a woman of me. I’m honestly glad he is so happy, and things are much more suitable as they are, for Payson is a thorough-going society man, and doesn’t ask much in a wife or he wouldn’t have me, and he doesn’t expect much from a wife or he couldn’t get me. ”

“ When I consider the general run of engaged people, I am inclined to agree with them. Everybody seems to think they are making an experiment of marriage, because they are so much alike. But, then, doesn’t every one who marries at all, Jew or Gentile, black or white, bond or free, make an experiment? I myself have no fear as to how the Percival experiment will turn out. Rachel says that they are so similar in all their tastes and ideals that if she were a man she would be Percival, and if he were a woman he would be Rachel. ”

“ Now it must be Louise who would be adjusted, and Norris Whitehouse was just the man to know the curious fact that the more fiery and impetuous a woman is, the more easily, if she is in love, will she mould herself to circumstances. The more untamed and unbending she seems, the more helpless will she be under the strong excitement of love or grief.
A strong-minded woman is easier to persuade than a weak one. The grander the nature the greater its pliability towards truth. ”

“ Men are fond of saying that, I notice, but I don’t think we women bear out the truth. I couldn’t love a man I pitied. I could love one I was proud of, or afraid of, but one I pitied? Never. It is more true to say it of men. I believe plenty of girls obtain husbands by virtue of their weakness, their loneliness, their helplessness, their—anything which makes a man pity them. Pleasant thought, isn’t it, for a woman who loves her own sex and wishes it held its head up better! ”

“ There is so much in life which we could not see at the beginning, but which grows with our growth and bears us company in the richness of evening-tide. I have learned to love my life and to cultivate it. Who knows what is in her life until she has tended it and made it know that she expects something from it in return for all her aspirations and endeavors? ”

“ But did you ever consider what an honor the love of such a man as your husband is? Do you know how he is admired by great men? Do you realize how he must love you, and what magnificent faith he must have to wish to marry a young girl like you who admits that she does not love him? If you never do anything else in this world except to deserve the faith he has in you, you will live a worthy life.”
We were standing still now, and Louise was looking at her husband at a distance with a look in her eyes which was good to see. ”

“ Fortunately, Asbury does not care for Sallie Cox any more. When his vanity was wounded, his love died instantly. I think he is more in love with himself than he ever was with any woman. There are men, you know, whose one grand passion in life is for themselves. But Alice knows that Brandt still cares for her, and she feeds her romantic fancy on this fact, and has her introspective miseries to her heart’s content. She is far too cool-headed a woman to do anything rash. ”

“ I do not even understand how she can love me so much. I am nothing extraordinary, but if you knew the way she treats me, you would think I was Achilles or some of those Greek fellows. She has refused better and richer men than I. Norris Whitehouse has loved her all her life, and you know what a splendid man he is, but Louise ridicules the idea of ever caring for anybody but me. ”

“ There’s no use in talking; after a girl falls in love with a man she often ceases to be the girl he courted.”
I recalled what I had said to Percival—“Often a woman denies herself the expression of the best part of her love, for fear that it will be either a puzzle or a terror to her lover.” Such a saying belonged to Percival. I shouldn’t think of repeating it to Charlie, for he could not comprehend it. I should puzzle him as much as Louise did. It made me heartsick. How could even Charlie Hardy so persistently misunderstand the grandeur of Louise King? ”

“ Nevertheless, I cared for her enough to enter my feeble and futile protest; but it was waved aside with the superb effrontery of a woman who feels that she controls the situation with her head, and whose heart is not at liberty to make uncomfortable complications. I would rather argue with a woman who is desperately in love, to prevent her marrying the man of her choice, than to try to dissuade a woman from marrying a man she has set her head upon. ”

“ I believe one reason is that like seldom marries like. For my part I do not believe in the marriage of opposites. Look at Robert Browning and his wife. That is my ideal marriage. Their art and brains were married, as well as their hands and hearts. It is pure music to think of it. And, to me, the most pathetic poem in the English language is Browning’s ‘Andrea del Sarto.’”
“Isn’t it strange to see the kind of men who love clever women like you? You never could have brought yourself to marry any of them, expecting to find them congenial. ”

“ Do you know, Ruth, I think men are a good deal more human than women. You can work them out by algebra (for they never have more than one unknown quantity, and in the woman problem there would be more x’s than anything else) , and you can go by rules and get the answer. But nothing ever calculated or evolved can get the final answer to one woman—though they do say she is fond of the last word! We understand ourselves intuitively, and we understand men by study, yet we are made the receivers, not the givers; the chosen, not the choosers. ”

“ It was selfish of me to show you the way I look at things and to try to make you dissatisfied. Never mind. You are stronger than I. I could not live without love; I should die. But if you can, it may be that you are fulfilling your destiny more nobly than many another who has more of what I should choose. ”

“ I was sick of lovers, and some of the last had been so unpleasant, not to say rude, when I threw them over, that I thought I would take a vacation. So when I met Payson, I said, ‘What do you say to a Platonic friendship?’ It sounds harmless, you know, Ruth, and he, not knowing me at all, assented. If he had been a man who knew of my checkered career, he would have refused, suspecting, of course, that I was going to flirt with him under a new name. ”

“ Do you imagine that Biology kills blushing in a woman? Do you think that Philosophy keeps me from crying myself to sleep when I think he doesn’t care for me, or growing idiotically glad when he tells me he does? What rubbish people write upon this subject! Even Pope proved that he was only a man when he said,
“‘Love seldom haunts the breast where learning lies,
And Venus sets ere Mercury can rise.’ ”

“ Payson Osborne to seek out any one that it excited my wonder. But she was not to be balked by anything; moreover, I had great faith in her motives, which were sound and good, even if her plans of carrying them out inclined to the frivolous.
But all at once her frivolity seemed to reach a climax. She issued invitations for a lawn fête, to be followed by a very private, very select dinner, after which came the cotillon. She had decorators from New York, and otherwise ordered the most extravagant setting for her entertainment. ”

“ Well, the love affairs of other people are the rightful inheritance of old maids. In sharing them I am only coming into my kingdom.
Alice Asbury has made shipwreck of hers. The girl is actively miserable and her husband is indifferently uncomfortable, which is the habit this married couple have of experiencing the same emotion.
Alice is a mass of contradictions to those who do not understand her—now in the clouds, now in the depths. Bad weather depresses her; so does a sad story, the death of a kitten, solemn music. ”