The Spinster Book Part 13

[Sidenote: "Unequal Marriages"]

We hear a great deal of "unequal marriages," not merely in degree of fortune, but in taste and mental equipment. A man steeped to his finger-tips in the lore of the ancients chooses a pretty b.u.t.terfly who does not know the difference between a hieroglyph and a Greek verb, and to whom Rome and Carthage are empty names. His friends predict misery, and wonder at his blindness in pa.s.sing by the young woman of equal outward charm who delivered a scholarly thesis at her commencement and has the degree of Master of Arts.

A talented woman marries a man without proportionate gifts and the tabbies call a special session. It is decided at this conclave that "she is throwing herself away and will regret it." To everyone's surprise, she is occasionally very happy with the man she has chosen, though about some things of no particular importance she knows much more than he.

The law of compensation is as certain in its action as that of gravitation, though it is not so widely understood. Nature demands balance and equality. She is constantly chiselling at the mountain to lower it to the level of the plain, and welding heterogeneous elements into h.o.m.ogeneous groups.

[Sidenote: The Certain Instinct]

The pretty b.u.t.terfly may easily prove a balance wheel to the man of much wisdom. She will add a vivid human interest to his abstract pursuits and keep him from growing narrow-minded. He chose the element he needed to make him symmetrical, with the certain instinct which impels isolated atoms of hydrogen and oxygen to combine in the proportion of two to one.

It never occurs to the tabbies that no talent or facility can ever stifle a woman's nature. The simple need of her heart is never taken into account in the criticism of these marriages which are deemed "unequal." If a woman holds an a.s.sistant professorship of mathematics in a university, it is a foregone conclusion that she should fall in love with someone who is proficient in trigonometry and holds his tangents and cosines in high esteem. Happy evenings could then be spent with a book of logarithms and sheets of paper specially cut to accommodate a problem.

Similarity of tastes may sometimes prove an attraction, but very seldom similarity of pursuit. Musicians do not often intermarry, and artists and writers are more apt to choose each other than exponents of their own cult.

[Sidenote: Appreciation and Accomplishment]

It is not surprising if a man who is pa.s.sionately fond of music falls in love with a woman who has a magnificent voice, or a power which amounts to magic over the strings of her violin. Appreciation is as essential to happiness as accomplishment, and when the two are balanced in marriage, comradeship is inevitable. An artist may marry a woman who does not understand his pictures, but if she had not appreciated him in ways more vital to his happiness, there would have been no marriage.

It is pathetic to see what marriage sometimes is, compared with what it might be--to see it degraded to the level of a business transaction when it was meant to be infinitely above the sordid touch of the dollar and the dime. It is a perverted instinct which leads one to marry for money, for it will not buy happiness, though it may secure an imitation which pleases some people for a little while.

There is nothing so beautiful as a girl's dream of her marriage, and nothing so sad as the same girl, if Time brings her disillusion instead of the true marriage which is "a mutual concord and agreement of souls, a harmony in which discord is not even imagined; the uniting of two mornings that hope to reach the night together."

The world is full of pain and danger for those who face it alone, and home, that sanctuary where one may find strength and new courage, must be built upon a foundation of mutual helpfulness and trust. No one can make a home alone. It needs a man's strong hands, a woman's tender hands, and two true hearts.

[Sidenote: The Light upon the Altar]

The light which shines upon the bridal altar is either the white flame of eternal devotion or the sacrificial fire which preys hungrily upon someone's disappointment and someone's broken heart. But to the utter rout of the cynic, the dream which led the two souls thither sometimes becomes divinely true.

Marriage is said to be sufficient "career" for any woman, and it is equally true of men. Like Emerson's vision of friendship, it is fit "not only for serene days and pleasant rambles, but for all the pa.s.sages of life and death."

It is to make one the stronger because one does not have to go alone. It is to make one's joy the sweeter because it is shared. It is to take the sting away from grief because it is divided, and the dear comfort of the other's love lies forever around the sore and doubting heart.

[Sidenote: Fire and Snow]

It is to be the light in the darkness, the belief in the distrust, the never-failing source of consolation. It is to be the gentlest of forgiveness for all of one's mistakes--strength and tenderness, pa.s.sion and purity, the fire and the snow.

It is to make one generous to all the world with one's sympathy and compa.s.sion, because in the sanctuary there is no lack of love. It is "the joining together of two souls for life, to strengthen each other in all peril, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent, unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting."

The Physiology of Vanity

[Ill.u.s.tration]

The Physiology of Vanity

[Sidenote: Conceit and Vanity]

"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!" It is the common human emotion, the root of the personal equation, the battling residuum in the last a.n.a.lysis of social chemistry. There is a wide difference between conceit and vanity. Conceit is lovable and unconcealed; vanity is supreme selfishness, usually hidden. Conceit is based upon an unselfish desire to please; vanity takes no thought of others which is not based upon egotism.

Vanity and jealousy are closely allied, while conceit is a natural development of altruistic virtue. Conceit is the mildest of vices; vanity is the worst. Men are usually conceited but infrequently vain, while women are seldom afflicted with the lesser vice.

Man's conceit is the simplest form of self-appreciation. He thinks he is extremely good-looking, as men go; that he has seen the world; that he is a good judge of dinners and of human nature; that he is one of the few men who may easily charm a woman.

The limits of man's conceit are usually in full view, but eye nor opera-gla.s.s has not yet approached the end of woman's vanity. The disease is contagious, and the men who suffer from it are usually those whose chosen companions are women.

Woman's vanity is a development of her insatiate thirst for love. Her smiles and tears are all-powerful with her lover, and nothing goes so quickly to a woman's head as a sense of power. She forever defies the Salic law--each woman feels that her rightful place is upon a throne.

[Sidenote: The One Object]

The one object of woman's life is the acquirement of power through love.

It is because this power is freely recognised by the men who seek her in marriage that her vanity seldom has full scope until after she is married.

[Sidenote: The Destroyer]

After marriage, a great many women begin the slow process of alienating a man from his family, blind to the fact that by lessening his love for others, they add nothing to their own store. The filial and fraternal love is not to be given to anyone but mother and sisters--they have no place in a man's heart that another woman could fill. The destroyer simply obliterates that part of his life and offers nothing in its place.

The achievement sometimes takes years, but it is none the less sure.

Later, it may be extended to father and brothers, but they are always the last to be considered.

It is most difficult of all to break the tie which binds a man to his mother. The one who bore him is not faultless, for motherhood brings new gifts of feeling, sometimes sacrificing judgment and clear vision to selfish unselfishness. It is only in fiction and poetry that such love is valued now, for the divine blindness which does not question, which asks only the right to give, has lost beauty in our age of reason and restraint.

He had thought that face the most beautiful in all the world--until he fell in love. Now he sees his mother as she is; a wrinkled old woman, perverse, unreasonable, and inclined to meddle with his domestic affairs. The hands that soothed his childish fretting are no longer lovely. Inattention to small details of dress, which he never noticed before, are painfully evident. The eyes that have watched him all his life with loving anxiety, shining with pride at his success and softening with tenderest pity at his mistakes, are subtly different now.

He wonders at his blindness. It is strange, indeed, that he has not realised all this before.

[Sidenote: The Awakening]

To most men the awakening comes too late if it comes at all. Only when the faded eyes are closed and the worn hands folded forever; when "mother" is beyond the reach of praise or blame, her married boy realises what has been done. With that first shock comes bitterest repentance--and he never forgives his wife. Many a woman who complains of "coldness" and "lost love" might trace it back to the day her husband's mother died, and to the sudden flash of insight, the adjustment of relation, which comes with death.

The comic papers have made the mother-in-law a thing to be dreaded. She is the poster attached to the matrimonial magazine which inspires would-be purchasers with awe. Many an engaged girl confides to her best friend that her fiance's mother is "an old cat." She usually goes still further, and gives jealousy as the cause of it.

No right-minded mother was ever jealous of the woman her son chose for his wife. But she has seen how marriage changes men and naturally fears the result. The altar is the grave of many a boy's love for his mother.

Neither of the women most intimately concerned is blind to the impending possibilities; it is only man who cannot see.

[Sidenote: One in a Thousand]

There are some girls who realise what it means, but they are few and far between. One in a thousand, perhaps, will openly acknowledge her debt to the woman who for twenty-five or thirty years has given her best thought to the man she is about to marry.

Is he strong and active, healthy and finely moulded? It is his mother's care for the first sixteen years of his life. It is the result of her anxious days and of many a sleepless night, while the potential man was racked with fever and childish ills. His chivalrous devotion to the girl he loves is wholly due to his mother's influence. His clean and open-hearted manliness is a free gift to her, from the woman now characterised as "an old cat."

It is seldom that the mother receives credit for his virtues, but she is invariably blamed for his faults. Too many women expect a man to be cut out by their pattern. The supreme mental achievement is the ability to judge other people by their own standards, and a crank is not necessarily a person whose rules of life and conduct do not coincide with our own.

[Sidenote: The Thirst for Power]