April Hopes. William Dean Howells
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speak to him again?” suggested Miss Cotton.
“No, I don't say that. But she would think twice before marrying him.”
“And then do it,” said Mrs. Stamwell pensively, with eyes that seemed looking far into the past.
“Yes, and quite right to do it,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “I don't know that we should be very proud ourselves if we confessed just what caught our fancy in our husbands. For my part I shouldn't like to say how much a light hat that Mr. Brinkley happened to be wearing had to do with the matter.”
The ladies broke into another laugh, and then checked themselves, so that Mrs. Pasmer, coming out of the corridor upon them, naturally thought they were laughing at her. She reflected that if she had been in their place she would have shown greater tact by not stopping just at that instant.
But she did not mind. She knew that they talked her over, but having a very good conscience, she simply talked them over in return. “Have you seen my daughter within a few minutes?” she asked.
“She was with Mr. Mavering at the end of the piazza a moment ago,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “They must leave just gone round the corner of the building.”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Pasmer. She had a novel, with her finger between its leaves, pressed against her heart, after the manner of ladies coming out on hotel piazzas. She sat down and rested it on her knee, with her hand over the top.
Miss Cotton bent forward, and Mrs. Pasmer lifted her fingers to let her see the name of the book.
“Oh yes,” said Miss Cotton. “But he's so terribly pessimistic, don't you think?”
“What is it?” asked Mrs. Brinkley.
“Fumee,” said Mrs. Pasmer, laying the book title upward on her lap for every one to see.
“Oh yes,” said Mrs. Brinkley, fanning herself. “Tourguenief. That man gave me the worst quarter of an hour with his 'Lisa' that I ever had.”
“That's the same as the 'Nichee des Gentilshommes', isn't it?” asked Mrs. Pasmer, with the involuntary superiority of a woman who reads her Tourguenief in French.
“I don't know. I had it in English. I don't build my ships to cross the sea in, as Emerson says; I take those I find built.”
“Ah! I was already on the other side,” said Mrs. Pasmer softly. She added: “I must get Lisa. I like a good heart-break; don't you? If that's what gave you the bad moment.”
“Heart-break? Heart-crush! Where Lavretsky comes back old to the scene of his love for Lisa, and strikes that chord on the piano—well, I simply wonder that I'm alive to recommend the book to you.
“Do you know,” said Miss Cotton, very deferentially, “that your daughter always made me think of Lisa?”
“Indeed!” cried Mrs. Pasmer, not wholly pleased, but gratified that she was able to hide her displeasure. “You make me very curious.”
“Oh, I doubt if you'll see more than a mere likeness of temperament,” Mrs. Brinkley interfered bluntly. “All the conditions are so different. There couldn't be an American Lisa. That's the charm of these Russian tragedies. You feel that they're so perfectly true there, and so perfectly impossible here. Lavretsky would simply have got himself divorced from Varvara Pavlovna, and no clergyman could have objected to marrying him to Lisa.”
“That's what I mean by his pessimism,” said Miss Cotton. “He leaves you no hope. And I think that despair should never be used in a novel except for some good purpose; don't you, Mrs. Brinkley?”
“Well,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “I was trying to think what good purpose despair could be put to, in a book or out of it.”
“I don't think,” said Mrs. Pasmer, referring to the book in her lap, “that he leaves you altogether in despair here, unless you'd rather he'd run off with Irene than married Tatiana.”
“Oh, I certainly didn't wish that;” said Miss Cotton, in self-defence, as if the shot had been aimed at her.
“The book ends with a marriage; there's no denying that,” said Mrs. Brinkley, with a reserve in her tone which caused Mrs. Pasmer to continue for her—
“And marriage means happiness—in a book.”
“I'm not sure that it does in this case. The time would come, after Litvinof had told Tatiana everything, when she would have to ask herself, and not once only, what sort of man it really was who was willing to break his engagement and run off with another man's wife, and whether he could ever repent enough for it. She could make excuses for him, and would, but at the bottom of her heart—No, it seems to me that there, almost for the only time, Tourguenief permitted himself an amiable weakness. All that part of the book has the air of begging the question.”
“But don't you see,” said Miss Cotton, leaning forward in the way she had when very earnest, “that he means to show that her love is strong enough for all that?”
“But he doesn't, because it isn't. Love isn't strong enough to save people from unhappiness through each other's faults. Do you suppose that so many married people are unhappy in each other because they don't love each other? No; it's because they do love each other that their faults are such a mutual torment. If they were indifferent, they wouldn't mind each other's faults. Perhaps that's the reason why there are so many American divorces; if they didn't care, like Europeans, who don't marry for love, they could stand it.”
“Then the moral is,” said Mrs. Pasmer, at her lightest through the surrounding gravity, “that as all Americans marry for love, only Americans who have been very good ought to get married.”
“I'm not sure that the have-been goodness is enough either,” said Mrs. Brinkley, willing to push it to the absurd. “You marry a man's future as well as his past.”
“Dear me! You are terribly exigeante, Mrs. Brinkley,” said Mrs. Pasmer.
“One can afford to be so—in the abstract,” answered Mrs. Brinkley.
They all stopped talking and looked at John Munt, who was coming toward them, and each felt a longing to lay the matter before him.
There was probably not a woman among them but had felt more, read more, and thought more than John Munt, but he was a man, and the mind of a man is the court of final appeal for the wisest women. Till some man has pronounced upon their wisdom, they do not know whether it is wisdom or not.
Munt drew up his chair, and addressed himself to the whole group through Mrs. Pasmer: “We are thinking of getting up a little picnic to-morrow.”
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