Sacred and Profane Love | Page 3

seven years had grown legendary;
Diaz, the Liszt and the Rubenstein of my generation, and the greatest interpreter of
Chopin since Chopin died--Diaz! Diaz! No such concert had ever been announced in the
Five Towns, and I was to miss it! Our tickets had been taken, and they were not 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