The Love Affairs of an Old Maid | Page 4

and sometimes I am convinced that they leave the most of it
with me.
Now I can feel at liberty to enjoy and sympathize as I will. Well, the
love affairs of other people are the rightful inheritance of old maids. In
sharing them I am only coming into my kingdom.
Alice Asbury has made shipwreck of hers. The girl is actively
miserable and her husband is indifferently uncomfortable, which is the
habit this 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.