The Love Affairs of an Old Maid | Page 5

chamber in her flat has been occupied by all the girls that she can persuade to visit her. Asbury dislikes company, but she says she does not care. She cannot keep visitors long, because as soon as they discover that they are unwelcome to Asbury, naturally they go home.
Fortunately, Asbury does not care for Sallie Cox any more. When his vanity was wounded, his love died instantly. I think he is more in love with himself than he ever was with any woman. There are men, you know, whose one grand passion in life is for themselves. But Alice knows that Brandt still cares for her, and she feeds her romantic fancy on this fact, and has her introspective miseries to her heart's content. She is far too cool-headed a woman to do anything rash. Sometimes I think her morbid nature obtains more real satisfaction out of her joyless situation than positive happiness would compensate her for. She appears to take a certain negative pleasure in it. Their marriage is the product of a false civilization, and I pity them--at a distance--from the bottom of my heart. I am sorry for Brandt, too, for he honestly loved Alice and might have proved the hundredth man--who knows?
I do not quite know whether to be sorry for May Brandt or not, for she made complications and made them purposely. She made them so promptly, too, that she precluded the possibility of a reconciliation between Alice and Brandt. If Brandt had remained single, I doubt whether Alice would have had the courage to form an engagement with any other man. She loved him too truly to take the first step towards an eternal separation. Women seldom dare make that first move, except as a decoy. They are naturally superstitious, and even when curiously free from this trait in everything else, they cling to a little in love, and dare not tempt Fate too insolently.
A woman who has quarrelled with her lover, in her secret heart expects him back daily and hourly, no matter what the cause of the estrangement, until he becomes involved with another woman. Then she lays all the blame of his defection at the door of the alien, where, in the opinion of an Old Maid, it generally belongs.
If other women would let men alone, constancy would be less of a hollow mockery. (Query, but is it constancy where there is no temptation to be fickle?) Nevertheless, let "another woman" sympathize with an estranged lover, and place a little delicate blame upon his sweetheart and flatter him a great deal, and presto! you have one of those criss-cross engagements which turns life to a dull gray for the aching heart which is left out.
If, too, when this honestly loving woman appears to take the first step, her actions and mental processes could be analyzed and timed, it frequently would prove that, with her quicker calculations, she foresaw the fatal effect of the "other-woman" element, and, desirous of protecting her vanity, reached blindly out to the nearest man at her command, and married him with magnificent effrontery, just to circumvent humiliation and to take a little wind out of the other woman's sails. But could you make her lover believe that? Never.
And so May Lawrence played the "other woman" in the Asbury tragedy. I wonder if she is satisfied with her r?le. A girl who wilfully catches a man's heart on the rebound, does the thing which involves more risk than anything else malevolent fate could devise.
On the whole, I think I am sorry for her, for she has apples of Sodom in her hand, although as yet to her delighted gaze they appear the fairest of summer fruit.

III
MATRIMONY IN HARNESS
"What eagles are we still In matters that belong to other men; What beetles in our own!"
The more I know of horses, the more natural I think men and women are in the unequalness of their marriages. I never yet saw a pair of horses so well matched that they pulled evenly all the time. The more skilful the driver, the less he lets the discrepancy become apparent. Going up hill, one horse generally does the greater share of work. If they pull equally up hill, sometimes they see-saw and pull in jerks on a level road. And I never saw a marriage in which both persons pulled evenly all the time, and the worst of it is, I suppose this unevenness is only what is always expected.
Having no marriage of my own to worry over, it is gratuitous when I worry over other people's. Old maids, you know, like to air their views on matrimony and bringing up children. Their theories on these subjects have this advantage--that they always hold good because they never are tried.
There never was such an