And he swears his love, always promising matrimony as soon as a few difficulties, 'over which he has no control,' are surmounted. The poor little violet is fascinated, won; she loves him, and gives herself to him; but it is not long before he goes.
'Surely,' she says, with her eyes filled with tears, 'you are not going to abandon me. You are not going to leave me to fight the great big battle of life alone, with all the other flowers of the garden to sneer at me and despise me! Oh no, dear; I have loved you with my modest soul; I have given you all I have in the world. No, no, you are not going away, never to return again! It would be too cruel! No, the world is not so bad as that; you will return, won't you?'
'I feel very sorry for you, dear – really very sorry; but, you see, I cannot. I am a gentleman, and I have my social position to think of. I am sure you understand that. You say you are fond of me; then you will put yourself in my place, and conclude that I have done the best I could for you. Good-bye! Forget me as quickly as you can.'
The little violet commits suicide; and the butterfly, reading an account of it in the following day's papers, has not even a tear to shed, no remorse, no regret.
He is called by his club friends 'a devil of a fellow with the girls,' and that is almost meant as a compliment. As for the women of the very best society, he is thought rather enterprising and dangerous; but I have never heard that, for his conduct, he has ever been turned out of a respectable house or of a decent club.
There is one drawback to the perfect happiness of the butterfly: he is generally in love with a worthless woman, who makes a fool of him.
CHAPTER IV
WOMEN LOVE BETTER THAN MEN
How many people understand what love means? How many appreciate it? How many ever realize what it is? For some it is a more or less sickly sentiment, for others merely violent desires.
Alas! it requires so many qualifications to appreciate love that very few people are sufficiently free from some vulgarity or other to be worthy of speaking of love without profanity.
Love requires too much constancy to suit the light-hearted, too much ardour to suit calm temperaments, too much reserve to suit violent constitutions, too much delicacy to suit people destitute of refinement, too much enthusiasm to suit cool hearts, too much diplomacy to suit the simple-minded, too much activity to suit indolent characters, too many desires to suit the wise.
See what love requires to be properly and thoroughly appreciated, and you will easily understand why it must be in woman's nature to love better and longer than man.
Men can worship better than women, but women can love better than men. Of this there can be no doubt.
Very often women believe that they are loved when they are only ardently desired because they are beautiful, piquant, elegant, rich, difficult to obtain, and because men are violent, ambitious, wilful, and obstinate; and the more obstacles there are in their way, the more bent they feel on triumphing over difficulties.
To obtain a woman men will risk their lives, ruin themselves, commit any act of folly or extravagance which you care to name. Women are flattered by these follies and extravagances due to motives of very different characters; but they mistake passion for love.
Yet passion is very seldom compatible with true love. Passion is as fickle as love is constant. Passion is but a proof of vanity and selfishness.
Woman is only the pretext for the display of it. Singers, actresses, danseuses, all women detached from that shade and mystery in which love delights in dwelling, women who give to the public all the treasures of their beauty, amiability, and talent are those who inspire in men the most violent passions, but they are seldom truly loved unless they consent to retire from the glare of the footlights and withdraw to the shade.
Passion excites vanity, noise, envy: it plays to the gallery. Love seeks retirement, and prefers a moss bank against some wall covered with ivy, some solitude where silence is so perfect that two hearts can hear each other beat, where space is so small that lips must forcibly meet.
The man who takes his bride to Paris for the honeymoon does not really love her. If he loves truly he will take her to the border of a forest in some secluded, picturesque spot, where nature will act as a church in which both will fervently worship.
Now, with very few exceptions, women understand these things much better than men. They are born with feelings of delicacy and refinement that only few men can acquire or develop; they are more earnest, more poetical, better diplomatists, and of temperaments generally more artistic.
Besides – and it is in this that they are infinitely superior to men – whereas many men see their love cooled by possession, all women see theirs increased and sealed by it.
The moment a woman is possessed by the man she loves, she belongs to him body, heart, and soul. Her love is the occupation of her life, her only thought, and, I may add without the slightest idea of irreverence, her religion.
She loves that man as she does God. If all men could only be sufficiently impressed with this fact, how kind and devoted to women they would be!
CHAPTER V
IS WOMAN A RESPONSIBLE BEING?
There are nations still in existence where women are denied the possession of a soul; but these nations are not civilized. Now, Germany and England are civilized nations, yet I am not sure that some Germans and Englishmen really admit that women are beings possessed of a mind.
I have constantly heard Englishmen of 'the good old school' say: 'If a man steals my horse, my dog, my poultry, I have him arrested, and he gets a few months' imprisonment; if he steals my wife, he remains at large, unmolested. Yet, is not my wife my most valuable property?' And that good Englishman is absolutely persuaded that his argument is unanswerable.
The other day, in a German paper, I read the following exquisitely delicious remark: 'We have a treaty of extradition with Switzerland. If the man Giron had stolen the least valuable horse of the Crown Prince of Saxony, we could have had him arrested in Geneva and returned to us; but as he only stole the wife of that prince, the mother of his children, we can do nothing.'
From all this we are bound to conclude that, in the eyes of many Germans and some Englishmen, a woman is like a horse or any other animal, a thing, a 'brute of no understanding,' a being without a mind. In my ignorance I thought that when women left their husbands to follow other men, they were, rightly or wrongly, using their own minds, acting on their own responsibility and on their own good or bad judgment.
In other words, I thought that they were thinking beings.
When a man steals a horse, he takes him by the mane or the mouth and pulls him away with him. He does not say to the animal, 'I like you; I will treat you better than your master; will you come with me?' He steals him, as he would an inanimate thing.
When a man asks a woman to elope with him, he says to her: 'I love you, I know you love me; leave your husband, who makes you unhappy, and come with me, who will make you happy.' She reflects, and, through feelings of despair, of love, of passion, she yields, and answers, 'Yes, I will.'
Now, her resolution may be most reprehensible, her conduct immoral; she may be a fool, anything you like, but she is not carried off by force. She acts of her own accord and free will, and is, I imagine, prepared to meet the consequences of her actions.
I have heard an English magistrate say to a man whose wife was accused of disorderly conduct: 'You should look after your wife better than you do, and, in future, I will make you responsible for what she does. To-day I will impose a fine of ten shillings. If you pay it, I will set her free.'
Now, this argument would be fairly good if the accused had been a dog. I should understand a magistrate saying to a man: 'Your dog is a nuisance and a source of danger to your neighbours; if he causes any more damage, if I hear again that he has killed your neighbour's cat, eaten his poultry,