The Love Affairs of an Old Maid | Page 5

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 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 rôle. 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