The Love Affairs of an Old Maid | Page 4

married couple have of experiencing the same emotion.
Alice is a mass of contradictions to those who do not understand her--now in the clouds, now in the depths. Bad weather depresses her; so does a sad story, the death of a kitten, solemn music. She is correspondingly volatile in the opposite direction and often laughs at real calamities with wonderful courage. She has a fund of romance in her nature which has led her to the pass she now is in. She is clever, too, at introspection and analysis--of herself chiefly. She studies her own sensations and dissects her moods. Her selfishness is of the peculiar sort which should have kept her from marrying until she found the hundredth man who could appreciate her genius and bend it into nobler channels. Unfortunately she married one of the ninety-nine. She is not, perhaps, more selfish than many another woman, but her selfishness is different. She is mentally cross-eyed from turning her eyes inward so constantly.
She became engaged to Brandt--a man in every way worthy of her--and they loved each other devotedly. Then during a quarrel she broke the engagement, and he, being piqued by her withdrawal, immediately married May Lawrence, who had been patiently in love with him for five years, and who was only waiting for some such turn as this to deliver him into her hands. A poetic justice visits him with misery, for he still cares for Alice. May, however, is not conscious of this fact as yet.
Alice, being doubly stung by his defection, was just in the mood to do something desperate, when she began to see a great deal of Asbury, fresh from being jilted by Sallie Cox. Asbury was moody, and confided in Alice. Alice was foolish, and confided in him. They both decided that their hearts were ashes, love burned out, and life a howling wilderness, and then proceeded to exchange these empty hearts of theirs, and to go through the howling wilderness together.
Alice came to tell me about it. They had no love to give each other, she said sadly, but they were going to be married. I would have laughed at her if she had not been so tragic. But there is something about Alice, in spite of her romantic folly, (which she has adapted from the French to suit her American needs,) which forbids ridicule. Nevertheless I felt, with one of those sudden flashes of intuition, that this choice of hers was a hideous mistake. The situation repelled me. But the very strangeness of it seemed to attract the morbid Alice. And it was this one curious strain of unexplained foolishness marring her otherwise strong and in many ways beautiful character which prevented my loving her completely and safely. Nevertheless, I cared for her enough to enter my feeble and futile protest; but it was waved aside with the superb effrontery of a woman who feels that she controls the situation with her head, and whose heart is not at liberty to make uncomfortable complications. I would rather argue with a woman who is desperately in love, to prevent her marrying the man of her choice, than to try to dissuade a woman from marrying a man she has set her head upon. You feel sympathy with the former, and you have human nature and the whole glorious love-making Past at your back, to give you confidence and eloquence. But with the latter you are cowed and beaten beforehand, and tongue-tied during the contest.
So she became Alice Asbury, and these two blighted beings took a flat. Before they had been at home from their honeymoon a week she came down to see me, and told me that she hated Asbury.
Imagine a bride whose bouquet, only a month before, you had held at the altar, and heard her promise to love, honor, and obey a man until death did them part, coming to you with a confession like that. Still, if but one half she tells me of him is true, I do not wonder that she hates him.
With her revolutionary, anarchistic completeness, she has renounced the idea of compromise or adaptability as finally as if she had seen and passed the end of the world. There is no more pliability in her with regard to Asbury than there is in a steel rod. How different she used to be with Brandt! How she consulted his wishes and accommodated herself to him!
When a woman born to be ruled by love only passes by her master spirit, she becomes an anomaly in woman--she makes complications over which the psychologist wastes midnight oil, and if he never discovers the solution, it is because of its very simplicity.
All the sweetness seems to have left Alice's nature. She keeps somebody with her every moment. That one guest