The Cords of Vanity | Page 6

a Rational Person, led hither by a
Clothes' Moth, working out the problem of the hundred wickets in
consonance with the most approved methods. 'I have very nearly solved
it,' the Rational Person said, in genteel triumph, 'but this evening grows
too dark for any further ciphering, and again I must wait until
to-morrow. I regret, sir, that you have elected to waste the day, in
pursuit of various meretricious Lepidoptera.'
"'A happy day, my brother, is never wasted."
"'That appears to me to be nonsense,' said the Rational Person; and he
put up his portfolio, preparatory to spending another night under his

umbrella in the Fields.
"'Indeed, my brother?' laughed the Foolish Prince. 'Then, farewell, for I
am assured that yonder, as here, our father makes the laws, and that to
dispute his appreciation of the enticing qualities of butterflies were an
impertinence.'
"Thereafter, pushing open the wicket nearest to his hand, the Foolish
Prince tucked his bauble under his left arm and skipped into the
Disenchanted Garden; and as he went he sang, not noting that, from
somewhere in the thickening shadows, had arisen a golden butterfly
which went before him through the wicket.
"Sang the Foolish Prince:
"'Farewell to Fields and Butterflies And levities of Yester-year! For we
espy, and hold more dear, The Wicket of our Destinies.
"'Whereby we enter, once for all, A Garden which such fruit doth yield
As, tasted once, no more Afield We fare where Youth holds carnival.
"'Farewell, fair Fields, none found amiss When laughter was a frequent
noise And golden-hearted girls and boys Appraised the mouth they
meant to kiss.
"'Farewell, farewell! but for a space We, being young, Afield might
stray, That in our Garden nod and say, _Afield is no unpleasant
place.'"_
3--Arithmetic In such disconnected fashion, as hereafter, I record the
moments of my life which I most vividly remember. For it is possible
only in the last paragraphs of a book, and for a book's people only, to
look back upon an ordered and proportionate progression to what one
has become; in life the thing arrives with scantier dignity; and one
appears, in retrospection, less to have marched toward any goal than
always to have jumped and scrambled from one stepping-stone to
another because, however momentarily, "just this or that poor impulse
seemed the sole work of a lifetime."

Well! at least I have known these moments and the rapture of their
dominance; and I am not lightly to be stripped of recollection of them,
nor of the attendant thrill either, by any cheerless hour wherein, as
sometimes happens, my personal achievements confront me like a pile
of flimsy jack-straws.
What does it all amount to?--I do not know. There may be some sort of
supernal bookkeeping, somewhere, but very certainly it is not
conformable to any human mathematics.

_THE CORDS OF VANITY
"His has been the summer air, and the sunshine, and the flowers; and
gentle ears have listened to him, and gentle eyes have been upon him.
Let others eat his honey that please, so that he has had his morsel and
his song."_

1.
He Sits Out a Dance
When I first knew Stella she was within a month of being fifteen,
which is for womankind an unattractive age. There were a startling
number of corners to her then, and she had but vague notions as to the
management of her hands and feet. In consequence they were
perpetually turning up in unexpected places and surprising her by their
size and number. Yes, she was very hopelessly fifteen; and she was
used to laugh, unnecessarily, in a nervous fashion, approximating to a
whinny, and when engaged in conversation she patted down her skirts
six times to the minute.
It seems oddly unbelievable when I reflect that Rosalind--"daughter to
the banished Duke"--and Stella and Helen of Troy, and all the other
famous fair ones of history, were each like that at one period or
another.
As for myself, I was nine days younger than Stella, and so I was at this
time very old--much older than it is ever permitted anyone to be

afterward. I cherished the most optimistic ideas as to my impendent
moustache, and was wont in privacy to encourage it with the
manicure-scissors. I still entertained the belief that girls were upon the
whole superfluous nuisances, but was beginning to perceive the
expediency of concealing this opinion, even in private converse with
my dearest chum, where, in our joyous interchange of various heresies,
we touched upon this especial sub-division of fauna very lightly, and, I
now suspect, with some self-consciousness.
2
All this was at a summer resort, which was called the Green Chalybeate.
Stella and I and others of our age attended the hotel hops in the evening
with religious punctuality,