Delia Blanchflower | Page 2

to him amazing. Almost all the
middle-aged women in the hotel were too fat, and had lost their youth
thereby, prematurely. Must the fairy herself--Euphrosyne--come to
such a muddy vesture in the end? Twenty years hence?--alack!
"Beauty that must die." The hackneyed words came suddenly to mind,
and haunted him, as his eyes wandered round the room. Amid many
coarse or commonplace types, he yet perceived an unusual number of
agreeable or handsome faces; as is indeed generally the case in any
Austrian hotel. Faces, some of them, among the very young girls
especially, of a rose-tinted fairness, and subtly expressive, the dark
brows arching on white foreheads, the features straight and clean, the
heads well carried, as though conscious of ancestry and tradition; faces,
also, of the _bourgeoisie_, of a simpler, Gretchen-like beauty; faces--a
few--of "intellectuals," as he fancied,--including the girl with the
novel?--not always handsome, but arresting, and sometimes noble. He
felt himself in a border land of races, where the Teutonic and Latin
strains had each improved the other; and the pretty young girls and
women seemed to him like flowers sprung from an old and rich soil. He
found his pleasure in watching them--the pleasure of the Ancient
Mariner when he blessed the water-snakes. Sex had little to say to it;
and personal desire nothing. Was he not just over forty?--a very busy
Englishman, snatching a hard-earned holiday--a bachelor, moreover,
whose own story lay far behind him.
"_Beauty that must die_" The words reverberated and would not be
dismissed. Was it because he had just been reading an article in a new
number of the _Quarterly_, on "Contemporary Feminism," with
mingled amazement and revolt, roused by some of the strange facts
collected by the writer? So women everywhere--many women at any
rate--were turning indiscriminately against the old bonds, the old yokes,
affections, servitudes, demanding "self-realisation," freedom for the
individuality and the personal will; rebelling against motherhood, and
life-long marriage; clamouring for easy divorce, and denouncing their
own fathers, brothers and husbands, as either tyrants or fools; casting

away the old props and veils; determined, apparently, to know
everything, however ugly, and to say everything, however outrageous?
He himself was a countryman, an English provincial, with English
public school and university traditions of the best kind behind him, a
mind steeped in history, and a natural taste for all that was ancient and
deep-rooted. The sketch of an emerging generation of women, given in
the Quarterly article, had made a deep impression upon him. It seemed
to him frankly horrible. He was of course well acquainted, though
mainly through the newspapers, with English suffragism, moderate and
extreme. His own country district and circle were not, however, much
concerned with it. And certainly he knew personally no such types as
the Quarterly article described. Among them, no doubt, were the
women who set fire to houses, and violently interrupted or assaulted
Cabinet ministers, who wrote and maintained newspapers that decent
people would rather not read, who grasped at martyrdom and had
turned evasion of penalty into a science, the continental type, though
not as yet involved like their English sisters in a hand-to-hand, or
fist-to-fist struggle with law and order, were, it seemed, even more
revolutionary in principle, and to some extent in action. The life and
opinions of a Sonia Kovalevski left him bewildered. For no man was
less omniscient than he. Like the Cabinet minister of recent fame, in the
presence of such _femmes fortes_, he might have honestly pleaded,
_mutatis mutandis_, "In these things I am a child."
Were these light-limbed, dark-eyed maidens under his eyes touched
with this new anarchy? They or their elders must know something
about it. There had been a Feminist congress lately at Trient--on the
very site, and among the ghosts of the great Council. Well, what could
it bring them? Was there anything so brief, so passing, if she did but
know it, as a woman's time for happiness? "Beauty that must die."
As the words recurred, some old anguish lying curled at his heart raised
its head and struck. He heard a voice--tremulously sweet--"Mark!--dear
Mark!--I'm not good enough--but I'll be to you all a woman can."
She had not played with life--or scorned it--or missed it. It was not her
fault that she must put it from her.

In the midst of the crowd about him, he was no longer aware of it. Still
smoking mechanically, his eyelids had fallen over his eyes, as his head
rested against the wall.
He was interrupted by a voice which said in excellent though foreign
English--
"I beg your pardon, sir--I wonder if I might have that paper you are
standing on?"
He looked down astonished, and saw that he was trampling on the day's
_New York Herald_, which had fallen from a