قراءة كتاب Who Was She? From "The Atlantic Monthly" for September, 1874
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Who Was She? From "The Atlantic Monthly" for September, 1874
face, in the most unlikely places and under startling circumstances. However, the end of it all was patience—patience for six months.
There's not much more to tell; but this last letter is hard for me to read. It came punctually, to a day. I knew it would, and at the last I began to dread the time, as if a heavy note were falling due, and I had no funds to meet it. My head was in a whirl when I broke the seal. The fact in it stared at me blankly, at once, but it was a long time before the words and sentences became intelligible.
an end. Had I taken this resolution a year ago, it would
have saved me many vain hopes, and you, perhaps, a little
uncertainty. Forgive me, first, if you can, and then hear
the explanation!
"You wished for a personal interview: you have had, not
one, but many. We have met, in society, talked face to
face, discussed the weather, the opera, toilettes, Queechy,
Aurora Floyd, Long Branch, and Newport, and exchanged a
weary amount of fashionable gossip; and you never guessed
that I was governed by any deeper interest! I have purposely
uttered ridiculous platitudes, and you were as smilingly
courteous as if you enjoyed them: I have let fall remarks
whose hollowness and selfishness could not have escaped you,
and have waited in vain for a word of sharp, honest, manly
reproof. Your manner to me was unexceptionable, as it was to
all other women: but there lies the source of my
disappointment, of—yes—of my sorrow!
"You appreciate, I can not doubt, the qualities in woman
which men value in one another—culture, independence of
thought, a high and earnest apprehension of life; but you
know not how to seek them. It is not true that a mature and
unperverted woman is flattered by receiving only the general
obsequiousness which most men give to the whole sex. In the
man who contradicts and strives with her, she discovers a
truer interest, a nobler respect. The empty-headed, spindle-
shanked youths who dance admirably, understand something of
billiards, much less of horses, and still less of
navigation, soon grow inexpressibly wearisome to us; but the
men who adopt their social courtesy, never seeking to
arouse, uplift, instruct us, are a bitter disappointment.
"What would have been the end, had you really found me?
Certainly a sincere, satisfying friendship. No mysterious
magnetic force has drawn you to me or held you near me, nor
has my experiment inspired me with an interest which can not
be given up without a personal pang. I am grieved, for the
sake of all men and all women. Yet, understand me! I mean no
slightest reproach. I esteem and honor you for what you
are. Farewell!"
There! Nothing could be kinder in tone, nothing more humiliating in substance, I was sore and offended for a few days; but I soon began to see, and ever more and more clearly, that she was wholly right. I was sure, also, that any further attempt to correspond with her would be vain. It all comes of taking society just as we find it, and supposing that conventional courtesy is the only safe ground on which men and women can meet.
The fact is—there's no use in hiding it from myself (and I see, by your face, that the letter cuts into your own conscience)—she is a free, courageous, independent character, and—I am not. But who was she?