"Because I hope I shall never be idiot enough," she answered. "I see it all so clearly. I wish I didn't. Love! it's only an ugly thing with a pretty name. It will not be me that he will fall in love with. He will not know me until it is too late. How can he? It will be merely with the outside of me--my pink-and-white skin, my rounded arms. I feel it sometimes when I see men looking at me, and it makes me mad. And at other times the admiration in their eyes pleases me. And that makes me madder still."
The moon had slipped behind the wood. She had risen, and, leaning against the porch, was standing with her hands clasped. I fancy she had forgotten me. She seemed to be talking to the night.
"It's only a trick of Nature to make fools of us," she said. "He will tell me I am all the world to him; that his love will outlive the stars--will believe it himself at the time, poor fellow! He will call me a hundred pretty names, will kiss my feet and hands. And if I'm fool enough to listen to him, it may last"--she laughed; it was rather an ugly laugh--"six months; with luck perhaps a year, if I'm careful not to go out in the east wind and come home with a red nose, and never let him catch me in curl papers. It will not be me that he will want: only my youth, and the novelty of me, and the mystery.
And when that is gone--"
She turned to me. It was a strange face I saw then in the pale light, quite a fierce little face. She laid her hands upon my shoulders, and I felt them cold. "What comes when it is dead?" she said. "What follows? You must know. Tell me. I want the truth."
Her vehemence had arisen so suddenly. The little girl I had set out to talk with was no longer there. To my bewilderment, it was a woman that was questioning me.
I drew her down beside me. But the childish face was still stern.
"I want the truth," she said; so that I answered very gravely:
"When the passion is passed; when the glory and the wonder of Desire--Nature's eternal ritual of marriage, solemnising, sanctifying it to her commands--is ended; when, sooner or later, some grey dawn finds you wandering bewildered in once familiar places, seeking vainly the lost palace of youth's dreams; when Love's frenzy is faded, like the fragrance of the blossom, like the splendour of the dawn; there will remain to you, just what was there before--no more, no less. If passion was all you had to give to one another, God help you. You have had your hour of madness. It is finished. If greed of praise and worship was your price--well, you have had your payment. The bargain is complete. If mere hope to be made happy was your lure, one pities you. We do not make each other happy. Happiness is the gift of the gods, not of man. The secret lies within you, not without. What remains to you will depend not upon what you THOUGHT, but upon what you ARE. If behind the lover there was the man--behind the impossible goddess of his love-sick brain some honest, human woman, then life lies not behind you, but before you.
"Life is giving, not getting. That is the mistake we most of us set out with. It is the work that is the joy, not the wages; the game, not the score. The lover's delight is to yield, not to claim. The crown of motherhood is pain. To serve the State at cost of ease and leisure; to spend his thought and labour upon a hundred schemes, is the man's ambition. Life is doing, not having. It is to gain the peak the climber strives, not to possess it. Fools marry thinking what they are going to get out of it: good store of joys and pleasure, opportunities for self-indulgence, eternal soft caresses--the wages of the wanton. The rewards of marriage are toil, duty, responsibility--manhood, womanhood. Love's baby talk you will have outgrown. You will no longer be his 'Goddess,' 'Angel,' 'Popsy Wopsy,' 'Queen of his heart.' There are finer names than these: wife, mother, priestess in the temple of humanity. Marriage is renunciation, the sacrifice of Self upon the altar of the race. 'A trick of Nature' you call it. Perhaps. But a trick of Nature compelling you to surrender yourself to the purposes of God."
I fancy we must have sat in silence for quite a long while; for the moon, creeping upward past the wood, had flooded the fields again with light before Robina spoke.
"Then all love is needless," she said, "we could do better without it, choose with more discretion. If it is only something that worries us for a little while and then passes, what is the sense of it?"
"You could ask the same question of Life itself," I said; "'something that worries us for a little while, then passes.' Perhaps the 'worry,' as you call it, has its uses. Volcanic upheavals are necessary to the ****** of a world. Without them the ground would remain rock-bound, unfitted for its purposes. That explosion of Youth's pent-up forces that we term Love serves to the ****** of man and woman. It does not die, it takes new shape. The blossom fades as the fruit forms. The passion passes to give place to peace. The trembling lover has become the helper, the comforter, the husband."
"But the failures," Robina persisted; "I do not mean the silly or the wicked people; but the people who begin by really loving one another, only to end in disliking--almost hating one another. How do THEY get there?"
"Sit down," I said, "and I will tell you a story.