University of Virginia Library

19. CHAPTER XIX.
IN WHICH THERE IS BOTH ATTRACTION AND REPULSION.

Hannah Thurston's remark remained in Woodbury's ears
long after it was uttered. His momentary triumph over, he
began to regret having obeyed the impulse of the moment.
Mr. Grindle's discomfiture had been too cheaply purchased;
he was game of a sort too small and mean for a man of refined
instincts to notice even by a look. His own interruption, cool
and careless as he felt it to have been, nevertheless betrayed
an acknowledgment that he had understood the speaker's insinuation;
and, by a natural inference, that he was sufficiently
sensitive to repel it. Mr. Grindle was acute enough to make
this inference, and it was a great consolation to him, in his
own overthrow, to think that he had stung his adversary.

Woodbury, however, forgot his self-blame in the grateful
surprise of hearing its echo from Miss Thurston's lips. Her
remark betrayed a delicacy of perception which he had not
expected—more than this, indeed, it betrayed a consideration
for his character as a gentleman, which she could not have felt,
had she not, in imagination, placed herself in his stead. He
knew that a refined nature must be born so; it can only be
partially imitated by assiduous social study; and his previous
intercourse with Miss Thurston had not prepared him to find
her instincts so true. He looked at her, as she walked beside
him, with a renewed feeling of interest. Her slender figure
moved along the grassy path with a free, elastic step. She
wore a dress of plain white muslin, with wide sleeves, and a
knot of pearl-colored ribbon at the throat. Her parasol, and
the trimming of her hat, were of the same quiet color; the

only ornament she wore was a cluster of little pink flowers in
the latter. The excitement of the occasion, or the act of
walking, had brought a soft tinge to her usually pale cheek,
and as her eyes dropped to avoid the level light of the sun,
Woodbury noticed how long and dark were the lashes that
fringed her lids. “At eighteen she must have been lovely,”
he said to himself, “but, even then, her expression could
scarcely have been more virginly pure and sweet, than now.”

He turned away, repressing a sigh. How one delusion
could spoil a noble woman!

Before descending the last slope to the village, they paused,
involuntarily, to contemplate the evening landscape. The sun
was just dipping behind the western hill, and a portion of
Ptolemy lay in shadow, while the light, streaming through the
gap made by a lateral glen, poured its dusty gold over the
distant elms of Roaring Brook, and caused the mansion of
Lakeside to sparkle like a star against its background of firs.
Far down the lake flashed the sail of a pleasure-boat, and the
sinking western shore melted into a vapory purple along the
dim horizon. The strains of the band still reached them from
the grove, but softened to the airy, fluctuating sweetness of
an Æolian harp.

“Our lines are cast in pleasant places,” said Mr. Waldo,
looking from hill to hill with a cheerful content on his face.

“Every part of the earth has its moments of beauty, I
think,” Woodbury replied: “but Ptolemy is certainly a
favored spot. If the people only knew it. I wonder whether
happiness is not a faculty, or a peculiarity of temperament,
quite independent of the conditions of one's life?”

“That depends on what you call happiness,” Mrs. Waldo
rejoined. “Come, now, let us each define it, and see how we
shall agree. My idea is, it's in making the best of every
thing.”

“No, it's finding a congenial spirit!” cried Miss Carrie.

“You forget the assurance of Grace,” said the clergyman.

“Fairly caught, Mrs. Waldo! You are no better than I:

you confess yourself an optimist!” Woodbury merrily exclaimed.
“So far, you are right—but, unfortunately, there
are some things we cannot make the best of.”

“We can always do our duty, for it is proportioned to our
power,” said Hannah Thurston.

“If we know exactly what it is.”

“Why should we not know?” she asked, turning quickly
towards him.

“Because the simple desire to know is not enough, although
I trust God gives us some credit for it. How much of Truth
is there, that we imperfectly grasp! How much is there, also,
that we shrink from knowing!”

“Shrink from Truth!”

“Yes, since we are human, and our nearest likeness to God
is a compassionate tenderness for our fellow-men. Does not
the knowledge of a vice in a dear friend give us pain? Do
we not cling, most desperately, to our own cherished opinions,
at the moment when we begin to suspect they are untenable?
No: we are not strong enough, nor stony-hearted enough, to
do without illusions.”

“Yet you would convince me of mine!” Hannah Thurston
exclaimed, with a shade of bitterness in the tone of her voice.
The next moment she felt a pang of self-rebuke at having
spoken, and the color rose to her face. The application she
had made of his words was uncalled-for. He must not thus be
met. He was so impregnable in his calmness, and in the conclusions
drawn from his ripe experience of life! Her own
faith tottered whenever their minds came in contact, yet if she
gave up it, how could she be certain, any longer, what was
Truth? He was not a hard materialist; he possessed fancy,
and feeling, and innate reverence; but his approach seemed to
chill her enthusiasm and benumb the free action of her mind.

“Oh, no!” he answered, with kindly seriousness, “I would
not consciously destroy a single innocent illusion. There are
even forms of Error which are only rendered worse by antagonism.
I have no idea of assailing all views that do not harmonize

with my own. I am but one among many millions,
and my aim is to understand Life, not forcibly change its
character.”

Walking a little in advance of the others, as they spoke, the
conversation was interrupted by their arrival in Ptolemy.
Woodbury declined an invitation to take tea with the Waldos,
and drove home with Bute, in the splendor of sunset. The
latter took advantage of the first opportunity to describe to
Mrs. Fortitude Babb the confusion which his master had
inflicted on Mr. Grindle.

“And sarved him right, too,” said she, with a grim satisfaction.
“To think o' him turnin' up his nose at her best Sherry,
and callin' it pizon!”

She could not refrain from expressing her approbation to
Woodbury, as she prepared his tea. Her manner, however,
made it seem very much like a reproof. “I've heerd, Sir,”
she remarked, with a rigid face, “that you've been speakin'. I
s'pose you'll be goin' to the Legislatur', next.”

Woodbury smiled. “Ill news travels fast,” he said.

“'T'a'n't ill, as I can see. She wouldn't ha' thought so,
nuther. Though, to be sure, sich fellers didn't come here, in
her time.”

“He will not come again, Mrs. Babb.”

“I'd like to see him try it!” With which words Mrs.
Babb slapped down the lid of the teapot, into which she had
been looking, with a sound like the discharge of a pocket-pistol.

Woodbury went into the library, wheeled his arm-chair to
the open window, lighted a cigar, and watched the risen moon
brighten against the yielding twilight. The figure of Hannah
Thurston, in her white dress, with the pearl-colored ribbon at
her throat, with the long lashes falling over her dark-gray eyes,
the flush on her cheek, and the earnest sweetness of her lips,
rose before him through the rings of smoke, in the luminous
dusk of the evening. A persistent fate seemed to throw them
together, only to show him how near they might have been,
how far apart they really were. When he recalled her courage

and self-possession during the scene in the grove above the
cataract, and the still greater courage which led her to Tiberius,
daring reproach in order to rescue a deluded creature from impending
ruin, he confessed to himself that for no other living
woman did he feel equal respect. He bowed down in reverence
before that highest purity which is unconscious of what
it ventures, and an anxious interest arose in his heart as he recognized
the dangers into which it might lead her. He felt
that she was capable of understanding him; that she possessed
the finer instincts which constituted what was best in his own
nature; that she yielded him, also, a certain respect: but it
was equally evident that her mind was unnecessarily alert and
suspicious in his presence. She assumed a constant attitude
of defence, when no attack was intended. He seemed to exercise
an unconscious repellant force towards her, the secret of
which he suspected must be found in herself—in the tenacity
with which she held to her peculiar views, and a feminine impatience
of contrary opinions.

But, as he mused, his fancies still came back to that one picture—the
pure Madonna face, with its downeast eyes, touched
with the mellow glory of the sunset. A noiseless breath of
the night brought to his window the creamy odor of the locust
blossoms, and lured forth the Persian dreams of the roses.
The moonlight silver on the leaves—the pearly obscurity of
the sky—the uncertain murmurs of the air—combined to steep
his senses in a sweet, semi-voluptuous trance. He was too
truly and completely man not to know what was lacking to
his life. He was accustomed to control passion because he
had learned its symptoms, but this return of the fever of youth
was now welcome, with all its pain.

Towards midnight, he started suddenly and closed the window.
“My God!” he exclaimed, aloud; “she in my arms!
her lips on mine! What was I thinking of? Pshaw—a strong-minded
woman! Well—the very strongest-minded of them
all is still very far from being a man.” With which consoling
excuse for the absurdity of his thoughts, he went to bed.

The next morning he spent an hour in a careful inspection
of the library, and, after hesitating between a ponderous translation
of the “Maha-bharata” and Lane's “Arabian Nights,”
finally replaced them both, and took down Jean Paul's “Siebenkäs”
and “Walt and Vult.” After the early Sunday dinner,
he put the volumes into his pockets, and, mounting his
horse, rode to Ptolemy.

Hannah Thurston had brought a chair into the open air, and
seated herself on the shady side of the cottage. The afternoon
was semi-clouded and mildly breezy, and she evidently found
the shifting play of sun and shade upon the eastern hill better
reading than the book in her hand, for the latter was closed.
She recognized Woodbury as he came into the street a little
distance below, and watched the motion of his horse's legs
under the boughs of the balsam-firs, which hid the rider from
sight. To her surprise, the horse stopped, opposite the cottage-door:
she rose, laid down her book, and went forward to
meet her visitor, who, by this time, had entered the gate.

After a frank and unembarrassed greeting, she said: “My
mother is asleep, and her health is so frail that I am very careful
not to disturb her rest. Will you take a seat, here, in the
shade?”

She then withdrew for a moment, in order to bring a second
chair. In the mean time, Woodbury had picked up her book:
it was Bettine's Correspondence with Günderode. “I am glad,”
said he, looking up at her approach, “that I was not wrong in
my selection.”

She answered his look with an expression of surprise.

“I am going away, in a few days, for a summer excursion,”
he added, by way of explanation, taking the books from his
pockets, “and in looking over my library this morning I found
two works, which, it occurred to me, you might like to read.
The sight of this volume convinces me that I have judged
correctly: they are also translations from the German.”

Hannah Thurston's eyes brightened as she took the books,
and looked at their title-pages. “Oh!” she exclaimed, “I

thank you very much! I have long wished to see these works:
Lydia Maria Child speaks very highly of them.”

“Who is Lydia Maria Child?”

She looked at him, almost in dismay. “Have you never
read her `Letters from New York?'” she asked. “I do not
suppose you are a subscriber to the Slavery Annihilator,
which she edits, but these letters have been collected and published.”

“Are they doctrinal?”

“Perhaps you would call them so. She has a generous sympathy
with all Progress; yet her letters are mostly descriptive.
I would offer them to you, if I were sure that you would read
them willingly—not as a task thrust upon you.”

“You would oblige me,” said Woodbury, cordially. “I
am not unwilling to hear new views, especially when they are
eloquently presented. Anna Maria Child, I presume, is an
advocate of Woman's Rights?”

“You will, at least, find very little of such advocacy in her
letters.”

“And if I should?” he asked. “Do not confound me, Miss
Thurston, with the multitude who stand in hostile opposition
to your theory. I am very willing that it should be freely discussed,
because attention may thereby be drawn to many real
wrongs. Besides, in the long run, the practice of the human
race is sensible and just, and nothing can be permanently
adopted which is not very near the truth.”

“`Real wrongs!'” she repeated; “yes, I suppose our wrongs
are generally considered imaginary. It is a convenient way
of disposing of them.”

“Is that charge entirely fair?”

She colored slightly. Is the man's nature flint or iron, she
thought, that his mind is so equably clear and cold? Would
not antagonism rouse him into warmth, imparting an answering
warmth to her thoughts, which his unimpassioned manner
chilled to death? Then she remembered his contagious gayety
during the walk to Ptolemy, his terrible indignation in the
inn at Tiberius, and felt that she had done him wrong.

“I ask your pardon,” she answered, presently. “I did not
mean to apply the charge to you, Mr. Woodbury. I was
thinking of the prejudices we are obliged to encounter. We
present what we feel to be serious truths in relation to our sex,
and they are thrown aside with a contemptuous indifference,
which wounds us more than the harshest opposition, because
it implies a disbelief in our capacity to think for ourselves. You
must know that the word `feminine,' applied to a man, is the
greatest reproach—that the phrase `a woman's idea' is never
uttered but as a condemnation.”

“I have not looked at the subject from your point of view,”
said Woodbury, with an expressed respect in his manner,
“but I am willing to believe that you have reason to feel
aggrieved. You must remember, however, that the reproach
is not all on one side. You women are just as ready to condemn
masculine habits and ideas in your own sex. Among
children a molly-coddle is no worse than a tomboy. The fact,
after all, does not originate in any natural hostility or contempt,
on either side, but simply from an instinctive knowledge of
the distinctions of sex, in temperament, in habits, and in
mind.”

“In mind?” Hannah Thurston asked, with unusual calmness.
“Then you think that minds, too, are male and female?”

“That there are general distinctions, certainly. The exact
boundaries between them, however, are not so easily to be
defined. But there is a radical difference in the texture, and
hence in the action of the two. Do you not always instinctively
feel, in reading a book, whether the author is a man or a
woman? Can you name any important work which might
have been written, indifferently, by either?”

Miss Thurston reflected a while, and then suggested: “Mrs.
Somerville's `Physical Geography?'”

“Fairly answered,” said Woodbury, smiling. “I will not
reject the instance. I will even admit that a woman might
write a treatise on algebraic equations, in which there should
be no sign of her sex. Still, this would not affect the main

fact, which I think you will recognize upon reflection. I admit
the greatness of the immortal women of History. Nay, more:
I claim that men are not only willing, without the least touch
of jealousy, to acknowledge genius in Woman, but are always
the first to recognize and respect it. What female poet has
selected for her subject that `whitest lily on the shield of
France,' the Maid of Orleans? But Schiller and Southey have
not forgotten her. How rare it is, to see one of these famous
women eulogized by a woman! The principal advocate of
your cause—what is her name?—Bessie Stryker, would be
treated with more fairness and consideration by men than by
those of her own sex who are opposed to her views.”

“Yes, that is it,” she answered, sadly; “we are dependent
on men, and fear to offend them.”

“This much, at least, seems to be true,” said he, “that a sense
of reliance on the one hand and protection on the other constitutes
a firmer and tenderer form of union than if the natures
were evenly balanced. It is not a question of superiority,
but of radical and necessary difference of nature. Woman
is too finely organized for the hard, coarse business of the
world, and it is for her own sake that man desires to save her
from it. He stands between her and human nature in the
rough.”

“But could she not refine it by her presence?”

“Never—never!” exclaimed Woodbury. “On the contrary,
it would drag her down to unutterable depths. If
woman had the right of suffrage there would be less swearing
among the rowdies at the polls, the first time they voted, but
at the end of five years both sexes would swear together.
That is”—he added, seeing the shocked expression of Hannah
Thurston's face,—“supposing them to be equally implicated in
the present machinery of politics. The first time a female
candidate went into a bar-room to canvass for votes, she would
see the inmates on their best behavior; but this could not last
long. She would soon either be driven from the field, or
brought down to the same level. Nay, she would go below

it, for the rudest woman would be injured by associations
through which the most refined man might pass unharmed.”

The tone of grave conviction in his words produced a strong
though painful impression upon his hearer. She had heard
very nearly the same things said, in debate, but they were
always met and apparently overcome by the millennial assurances
of her friends—by their firm belief in the possible perfection
of human nature, an illusion which she was too ready to
accept. A share in all the special avocations of Man, she had
believed, would result in his elevation, not in the debasement
of Woman.

“I should not expect a sudden change,” she said, at last,
“but might not men be gradually redeemed from their low
tastes and habits? Might not each sex learn from the other
only what is best and noblest in it? It would be very sad if
all hope for the future must be taken away from us.”

“All hope? No!” said Woodbury, rising from his seat.
“The human race is improving, and will continue to improve.
Better hope too much than not at all. But between the natures
of the sexes there is a gulf as wide as all time. The laws
by which each is governed are not altogether arbitrary; they
have grown, age after age, out of that difference in mental and
moral development of which I spoke, and which—pardon me
—you seem to overlook. Whatever is, is not always right, but
you may be sure there is no permanent and universal relation
founded on error. You would banish profanity, excesses,
brute force from among men, would you not? Have you ever
reflected that these things are distorted forms of that energy
which has conquered the world? Mountains are not torn
down, rivers bridged, wildernesses subdued, cities built, states
founded, and eternal dikes raised against barbarism, by the
eaters of vegetables and the drinkers of water! Every man who
is worth the name possesses something of the coarse, original
fibre of the race: he lacks, by a wise provision of Providence,
that finer protecting instinct which holds woman back from
the rude, material aspects of human nature. He knows and

recognizes as inevitable facts, many things, of which she does
not even suspect the existence. Therefore, Miss Thurston,
when you apply to men the aspirations of progress which you
have formed as a woman, you must expect to be disappointed.
Pardon me for speaking so plainly, in opposition to views
which I know you must cherish with some tenderness. I
have, at least, not been guilty of the offence which you
charged upon my sex.”

“No,” she answered, “you have been frank, Mr. Woodbury,
and I know that you are sincere. But may not your
views be still somewhat colored by the old prejudice?”

She blushed, the moment after she spoke. She had endeavored
to moderate her expressions, yet her words sounded
harsh and offensive.

But Woodbury smiled as he answered: “If it be so, why
should old prejudices be worse than new ones? A prejudice
is a weed that shoots up over night. It don't take two years
to blossom, like this foxglove.”

He broke off one of the long purple bells, and stuck it in the
button-hole of his coat.

“I like what slowly matures, and lasts long,” said he.

Hannah Thurston repeated some words of thanks for the
books, as he gave her his hand. From the shade of the fir she
watched him mount and ride into the village. “He will probably
take tea with the Waldos,” she thought: “I shall stay at
home.”

She resumed her seat, mechanically taking up the volumes
he had left, but did not open them. His words still lingered
in her mind, with a strange, disturbing effect. She felt that
he exercised an influence over her which she was not able satisfactorily
to analyze. The calmness of his utterance, the ripeness
of his opinions, the fairness of his judgment, attracted
her: she knew no man who compelled an equal respect: yet
there seemed to be very little in common between them. She
never met him without a painful doubt of herself being awakened,
which lasted long after his departure. She determined,

again and again, to avoid these mental encounters, but some
secret force irresistibly led her to speak. She felt, in her inmost
soul, the first lifting of a current, which, if it rose, would
carry her, she knew not where. A weird, dangerous power
in his nature seemed to strike at the very props on which her
life rested. With a sensation, almost of despair, she whispered
to herself: “I will see him no more.”

Woodbury, riding down the street, shook his head, and
thought, as he unnecessarily pricked his horse with the spur:
“I fear she is incorrigible.”