Burned Bridges | Page 4

always understood that. You've pointed it out. I do like Tommy. Why should my mind act as a brake on my feelings?"
"Because you happen to be made the way you are," Carr returned thoughtfully. "As I've told you a good many times, you've grown up a good deal different from the common run of girls. We've been isolated. Lacking the time-occupying distractions and pleasures of youth in a more liberal environment, Sophie, you've been thrown back on yourself and me and books, and as a result you've cultivated a natural tendency to think. Most young women don't. They're seldom taught any rational process of arriving at conclusions. You have developed that faculty. It has been my pride and pleasure to cultivate in you what I believed to be a decided mentality. I've tried to show you how to get down to fundamentals, to work out a philosophy of life that's really workable. Knowledge is worth having for its own sake. Once you find yourself in contact with the world--and for you that time is bound to come--you'll apply all the knowledge you've absorbed to problems as they arise. If there's a rational solution to any situation that faces you, you'll make an effort to find that solution. You'll do it almost instinctively. You can't help it. Your brain is too alert ever to let you act blindly. At the present your lack of experience probably handicaps you a little. In human relations you have nothing much but theory, got from the books you've digested and the way we've always discussed every possible angle of life. Take Tommy Ashe. He's practically the first young, attractive white man you've ever met, the very first possibility as a lover. Tommy's a nice boy, a pleasant, sunny-natured young fellow. Personally he's just the sort of fellow that would sweep a simple country girl clean off her feet. With you, your mind, as you just put it, acts as a brake on your feelings. Can't you guess why?"
"No," she said quietly. "I can't. I don't understand myself and my shifts of feeling. It makes me miserable."
"Look here, Sophie girl," Carr reached over and taking her by the hand drew her up on the low arm of his chair, "you're asking yourself a more or less important question directly, and you're asking it of me indirectly. Maybe I can help you. At least I can tell how I see it. You have all your life before you. You want to be happy. That's a universal human attribute. Sometime or other you're going to mate with a man. That too is a universal experience. Ordinary mating is based on sex instinct. Love is mostly an emotional disturbance generated by natural causes for profoundly natural and important ends. But marriage and the intimate associations of married life require something more substantial than a mere flare-up of animal instinct. Lots of men and women aren't capable of anything else, and consequently they make the best of what's in them. But there are natures far more complex. You, Sophie, are one of those complex natures. With you, a union based on sex alone wouldn't survive six months. Now, in this particular case, leaving out the fact that you can't compare Tommy Ashe with any other man, because you don't know any other man, can you conceive yourself living in a tolerable state of contentment with Tommy if, say, you didn't feel any more passion for him than you feel for, say, old Standing Wolf over there?"
"But that's absurd," the girl declared. "Because I have got that feeling for Tommy Ashe, and therefore I can't imagine myself in any other state. I can't look at it the cold-blooded way you do, Daddy dear."
"I'm stating a hypothetical case," Carr went on patiently. "You do now. We'll take that for granted. Would you still have anything fundamental in common with Tommy with that part left out? Suppose you got so you didn't care whether he kissed you or not? Suppose it were no longer a physical pleasure just to be near him. Would you enjoy his daily and hourly presence then, in the most intimate relation a man and a woman can hold to each other?"
"Why, I wouldn't live with him at all," the girl said positively. "I simply couldn't. I know."
"You might have to," Carr answered gently. "You have never yet run foul of circumstances over which you have no more power than man has over the run of the tides. But we'll let that pass. I'm trying to help you, Sophie, not to discourage you. There are some situations in which, and some natures to whom, half a loaf is worse than no bread. Do you feel, have you ever for an hour felt that you simply couldn't face an existence