Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land | Page 7

chiefly, I fancy, because he
was once private secretary to some Administrating Rajah in an
Eastern-Archipelago or Indian Island, and as Luke is hankering after a
colonial governorship, he wants to scrape up all the information he can
about such posts.
I answered Molly that one may have a violent attraction to a man
without in the least wanting to marry him, and that relieved her mind a
little.
As for HIM, the attraction on his part seems equally violent. We do the
most shockingly unconventional things together. He tells me that I
carry him off his feet--that I've revolutionised his ideas about the "nice
English Girl" (useless to protest that I'm not an English girl but a hybrid
Celt). He says that I've wiped off his slate the scheme of life he'd been
planning for his latter years. A comfortable existence in England--his

doctor advises him to settle down in a temperate climate--an
appointment on some City Board--rubber shares and that kind of
thing--you know it all--a red brick house in South Kensington and
perhaps a little place in the country. He did not fill in the picture--but I
did for him--with the charmingly domesticated wife-- well connected:
the typical "nice English Girl," heiress of a comfortable fortune to
supplement his own, which he candidly admitted needs supplementing.
Of course he's not a mere vulgar fortune-hunter. He must be genuinely
in love with the nice English Girl. And that's where I upset HIS
apple-cart.
In fact, we are both in an IMPASSE. I'm not eligible for his post and I
shouldn't want it if I were. To my mind marriage is only conceivable
with a barbarian or a millionaire. From the sordid atmosphere of
English conjugality upon an income of anything less than an assured
5,000 pounds a year, good Lord deliver me! And you know my reasons
for adding another clause to my litany. Good Lord deliver me also from
further experience of the exciting vicissitudes of a stock-jobbing career!
Then again, apart from personal prejudices, I am appalled, quite simply,
at the cold-blooded marriage traffic that I see going on in London. Any
crime committed in the name of Love is forgivable, but to sell a
girl--soul and body to the highest bidder is to my mind, the
unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost. Frankly, I'm petrified with
amazement at the way in which mothers hurl their daughters at the head
of any man who will make a good settlement. There's Molly's sister--
she chases the game till she has corralled it, and once inside her walls
the unfortunate prey hasn't swallowed his first cup of tea before she has
wedded him in imagination to one of her girls--"How do you like Mr
CHOSE?" "Like him? What is there to like? He's the same as all the
rest of the men, and they're as like as a box of ninepins. . ."
"But what do you think of him. . .?" "But really there's nothing to
think" . . . "But don't you think he'd do for Hester?" etcetera, etcetera.
She has just married the one before Hester to what she calls the perfect
type of an English country gentleman--meaning that he owns an
historical castle in Scotland, a coal mine in Wales and a mansion in
Park Lane. Heavens! I'd rather follow the fortunes of a Nihilist and be
sent to Siberia, or drive wild cattle and fight wild blacks with one of
your Bush cowboys, than I'd marry the perfect type of an English

country gentleman! Give me something REAL--anything but the
semi-detached indifference of most of the couples one knows. No. MY
man must be strong enough to carry ME off my feet and to break down
all the conventions of "OUR CLASS." Then, I'd cheerfully tramp
through the forest beside him, if it came to that, or cook his dinner in
front of our wigwam. Now, if my Soldier of Fortune were to ask me to
climb the Andes with him in search of that buried treasure! But he
won't: and--I confess it, Joan--I'm in mortal terror of his insisting upon
my entering the sphere of stock-jobbing respectability instead, and of
my being weak enough to consent. But we haven't got anywhere near
that yet.
So far, I'm just--living--trying to make up my mind what it is that I
want most. Do you know, that since my violent attraction to him--or
whatever you like to call it--all sorts of odd bits of revelation have
come to me as to the things that really matter!
For one thing, I'm pretty certain that the ultimate end of Being is
Beauty and that Love means Beauty and Beauty means Love. The
immediate result of this discovery is that I'm buying clothes with a
reckless disregard of the state