Sacred and Profane Love | Page 3

to be used! Unthinkable! A photograph of Diaz stood in a silver frame on the piano; I gazed at it fervently. I said: 'I will hear you play the Fantasia this night, if I am cut in pieces for it to-morrow!' Diaz represented for me, then, all that I desired of men. All my dreams of love and freedom crystallized suddenly into Diaz.
I ran downstairs to the breakfast-room.
'You aren't going to the concert, auntie?' I almost sobbed.
She sat in her rocking-chair, and the gray woollen shawl thrown round her shoulders mingled with her gray hair. Her long, handsome face was a little pale, and her dark eyes darker than usual.
'I don't feel well enough,' she replied calmly.
She had not observed the tremor in my voice.
'But what's the matter?' I insisted.
'Nothing in particular, my dear. I do not feel equal to the exertion.'
'But, auntie--then I can't go, either.'
'I'm very sorry, dear,' she said. 'We will go to the next concert.'
'Diaz will never come again!' I exclaimed passionately. 'And the tickets will be wasted.'
'My dear,' my Aunt Constance repeated, 'I am not equal to it. And you cannot go alone.'
I was utterly selfish in that moment. I cared nothing whatever for my aunt's indisposition. Indeed, I secretly accused her of maliciously choosing that night of all nights for her mysterious fatigue.
'But, auntie,' I said, controlling myself, 'I must go, really. I shall send Lucy over with a note to Ethel Ryley to ask her to go with me.'
'Do,' said my aunt, after a considerable pause, 'if you are bent on going.'
I have often thought since that during that pause, while we faced each other, my aunt had for the first time fully realized how little she knew of me; she must surely have detected in my glance a strangeness, a contemptuous indifference, an implacable obstinacy, which she had never seen in it before. And, indeed, these things were in my glance. Yet I loved my aunt with a deep affection. I had only one grievance against her. Although excessively proud, she would always, in conversation with men, admit her mental and imaginative inferiority, and that of her sex. She would admit, without being asked, that being a woman she could not see far, that her feminine brain could not carry an argument to the end, and that her feminine purpose was too infirm for any great enterprise. She seemed to find a morbid pleasure in such confessions. As regards herself, they were accurate enough; the dear creature was a singularly good judge of her own character. What I objected to was her assumption, so calm and gratuitous, that her individuality, with all its confessed limitations, was, of course, superior--stronger, wiser, subtler than mine. She never allowed me to argue with her; or if she did, she treated my remarks with a high, amused tolerance. 'Wait till you grow older,' she would observe, magnificently ignorant of the fact that my soul was already far older than hers. This attitude naturally made me secretive in all affairs of the mind, and most affairs of the heart.
We took in the county paper, the _Staffordshire Recorder,_ and the Rock and the Quiver. With the help of these organs of thought, which I detested and despised, I was supposed to be able to keep discreetly and sufficiently abreast of the times. But I had other aids. I went to the Girls' High School at Oldcastle till I was nearly eighteen. One of the mistresses there used to read continually a red book covered with brown paper. I knew it to be a red book because the paper was gone at the corners. I admired the woman immensely, and her extraordinary interest in the book--she would pick it up at every spare moment--excited in me an ardent curiosity. One day I got a chance to open it, and I read on the title-page, Introduction to the Study of Sociology, by Herbert Spencer. Turning the pages, I encountered some remarks on Napoleon that astonished and charmed me. I said: 'Why are not our school histories like this?' The owner of the book caught me. I asked her to lend it to me, but she would not, nor would she give me any reason for declining. Soon afterwards I left school. I persuaded my aunt to let me join the Free Library at the Wedgwood Institution. But the book was not in the catalogue. (How often, in exchanging volumes, did I not gaze into the reading-room, where men read the daily papers and the magazines, without daring to enter!) At length I audaciously decided to buy the book. I ordered it, not at our regular stationer's in Oldcastle Street, but at a little shop of the same kind in Trafalgar Road. In three days it arrived. I called for it,