nd I will sweep
away your cobwebs in the beginning. My dear, there is no such thing as
love as you conceive it. What you and the other poets have seen is a
will-o'-the-wisp, created, heaven knows why, save that we may learn
hard lessons and that the world may be peopled. You feel for me an
ecstasy of devotion. You think it will be eternal; that you were made
for me and I for you, and that our two souls will sail forever on in
each other's company, chanting pretty trifles by the way. God bless and
save you! this is the very hyperbole of the poets, and of poets under
forty at that. What dominates you is a fever of the blood, an attendant
delirium or the mind solely depending on your youth and my passable
prettiness. I wish you might have been saved; but it had to happen. I
wish, too, that the attack might leave you lightly; but that, also,
owing to your unfortunate temperament, is impossible. I can only show
my real liking for you by acting sedately, and sitting by your bedside
until you rise up sane again and put your hand to the world's work. Do
you want this emotion you call love translated to you by a woman who
has studied her kind as you study the birds? You say it is, it must be
(O, most pitiful cry of the finite after infinity!) eternal. It is
nothing of the sort. It is prosaically and sordidly of this earth,
especially in the case of men. I grant you that many women do
subordinate their lives to what they call a great passion (poor Amelia
crying over George's picture! O sad, true travesty of the worship we so
exalt!), but it is because they have fewer interests, and because
tradition has glorified feminine faithfulness and society built its
temples on woman's chastity. But men! I know them. Do not expect me to
own, for a moment, that any man is going to worship any woman all his
life long with the fervor he shows in pursuing the game. Many are kind,
some are tender, even to gray hairs and the grave; but that particular
form of idolatry which you offer me like a jewel in a case,--it turns
to paste in less than ten years, and I will have none of it. But why,
you ask, set myself outside the pale of human kind? It is a joy, though
fleeting, and if others prize it, even briefly, why not I? I know
myself too well. I am, in many ways, a hard woman. My heart is bedded
in a crust of flint, and no daw shall peck at it. But if that armor
were worn away, if I did sink my traditions to become all-womanly, if I
pinned life and s