第46章

--Now that means something,--said I to myself.--These rough young rascals very often hit the nail on the head, if they do strike with their eyes shut.A real woman does a great many things without knowing why she does them; but these pattern machines mix up their intellects with everything they do, just like men.They can't help it, no doubt; but we can't help getting sick of them, either.

Intellect is to a woman's nature what her watch-spring skirt is to her dress; it ought to underlie her silks and embroideries, but not to show itself too staringly on the outside.---You don't know, perhaps, but I will tell you; the brain is the palest of all the internal organs, and the heart the reddest.Whatever comes from the brain carries the hue of the place it came from, and whatever comes from the heart carries the heat and color of its birthplace.

The young man John did not hear my soliloquy, of course, but sent up one more bubble from our sinking conversation, in the form of a statement, that she was at liberty to go to a personage who receives no visits, as is commonly supposed, from virtuous people.

Why, I ask again, (of my reader,) should a person who never did anybody any wrong, but, on the contrary, is an estimable and intelligent, nay, a particularly enlightened and exemplary member of society, fail to inspire interest, love, and devotion? Because of the reversed current in the flow of thought and emotion.The red heart sends all its instincts up to the white brain to be analyzed, chilled, blanched, and so become pure reason, which is just exactly what we do not want of woman as woman.The current should run the other-way.The nice, calm, cold thought, which in women shapes itself so rapidly that they hardly know it as thought, should always travel to the lips via the heart.It does so in those women whom all love and admire.It travels the wrong way in the Model.That is the reason why the Little Gentleman said "I hate her, I hate her." That is the reason why the young man John called her the "old fellah," and banished her to the company of the great Unpresentable.

That is the reason why I, the Professor, am picking her to pieces with scalpel and forceps.That is the reason why the young girl whom she has befriended repays her kindness with gratitude and respect, rather than with the devotion and passionate fondness which lie sleeping beneath the calmness of her amber eyes.I can see her, as she sits between this estimable and most correct of personages and the misshapen, crotchety, often violent and explosive little man on the other side of her, leaning and swaying towards him as she speaks, and looking into his sad eyes as if she found some fountain in them at which her soul could quiet its thirst.

Women like the Model are a natural product of a chilly climate and high culture.It is not"The frolic wind that breathes the spring, Zephyr with Aurora playing,"when the two meet"---on beds of violets blue, And fresh-blown roses washed in dew,"that claim such women as their offspring.It is rather the east wind, as it blows out of the fogs of Newfoundland, and clasps a clear-eyed wintry noon on the chill bridal couch of a New England ice-quarry.--Don't throw up your cap now, and hurrah as if this were giving up everything, and turning against the best growth of our latitudes,--the daughters of the soil.The brain-women never interest us like the heart women; white roses please less than red.

But our Northern seasons have a narrow green streak of spring, as well as a broad white zone of winter,--they have a glowing band of summer and a golden stripe of autumn in their many-colored wardrobe;and women are born to us that wear all these hues of earth and heaven in their souls.Our ice-eyed brain-women are really admirable, if we only ask of them just what they can give, and no more.Only compare them, talking or writing, with one of those babbling, chattering dolls, of warmer latitudes, who do not know enough even to keep out of print, and who are interesting to us only as specimens of arrest of development for our psychological cabinets.

Good-bye, Model of all the Virtues! We can spare you now.A little clear perfection, undiluted with human weakness, goes a great way.

Go! be useful, be honorable and honored, be just, be charitable, talk pure reason, and help to disenchant the world by the light of an achromatic understanding.Goodbye! Where is my Beranger? Imust read a verse or two of "Fretillon."

Fair play for all.But don't claim incompatible qualities for anybody.Justice is a very rare virtue in our community.

Everything that public sentiment cares about is put into a Papin's digester, and boiled under high pressure till all is turned into one homogeneous pulp, and the very bones give up their jelly.What are all the strongest epithets of our dictionary to us now? The critics and politicians, and especially the philanthropists, have chewed them, till they are mere wads of syllable-fibre, without a suggestion of their old pungency and power.