My Dear Cornelia/Book 2/Chapter 2
There was a light rain at lunch-time, but it blew over, leaving the out-of-doors extraordinarily inviting. After I had written for two or three hours, I found myself walking—and chuckling—up the path through the birches to Cornelia's place. Under the hemlocks near the house, I passed Dorothy, in white tennis-attire with a sketchy sweater the color of California poppies, curled up in a hammock with a book. A young girl alone fills me with awe, like a cardinal building a nest; and I always try to slip past without disturbance—I feel that her mind must be occupied with something beautiful.
"What are you reading?" I called by way of greeting.
"I'm not reading," she replied, "I'm waiting for the young man that mother likes to have me play tennis with."
With an additional chuckle, I proceeded to the front of the house. My original merriment had been occasioned by two letters, in the morning mail, from correspondents at large who desired me to inform them whether Cornelia was "real." I was also wondering how much of these letters I could discreetly disclose to her.
She met me on the threshold of the wide verandah, standing for an instant tiptoe in a practicable yet perfect sylvan costume, and framed between two tall Chinese vases of wild tiger-lilies, which made a little pattern with the glints in her hair and the knot of soft flame at her breast.
"Let's walk!" she said.
"Let's," I replied; and we struck briskly into the abandoned road which runs, carpeted with bindweed and bittersweet, for miles and miles skirting the forest, with only a thin curtain of young silver poplars and birches between it and the lake. Cornelia is a light, crisp-footed walker,—at her gayest walking, and good for long distances,—my only complaint being that she has forgotten how to loiter. She seems rather bent upon reaching the terminus ad quem than careful to let me fall a step to the rear, where I may consider with more detachment how, like a dryad, she expresses and completes the woodland vista.
"I had a letter this morning," I began, "from an unknown lady. It would amuse you."
"Would it indeed?" said Cornelia, moving swiftly forward and at the same time calling my attention to the twittering brown flutter of a tree full of cedar-wings.
"Yes," I insisted, "I'm sure it's as interesting as bird study. This lady doubts your existence. Listen to this." I pulled forth a delicately tinted letter with a faint scent which died among the pungent fresh odors of the rain-washed air. "'Tell me,' she writes, 'whether Cornelia is real. If she is, I hope you are not in love with her. She is the feminine of Sir Austin Feverel. She has no heart. She is just unfaltering correctness. As a girl, I fancy, she folded her still hands in her lap and calmly waited till her family had consulted the bankers and the genealogists before she decided to care for the man she married. As a woman, she wishes to inspect and authorize every passion before she allows it to peep. I pity her children. She has never done a thing in her life merely because for one rapturous hour it seemed the most desirable thing in the wide world to do. I should hate her.'"
Cornelia brushed me sidelong with the sweep of her gray eyes, of which the effect, when one catches it so, is like that of the cool rays of a May sun bent to a focus under a burning-glass. But she only said, "What queer correspondents you have! And what a charming impression of me you have given them! Am I as hateful as that?"
It isn't difficult to say complimentary things to Cornelia. The difficulty is not to say them. But I make it a practice not to answer rhetorical questions. They divert one from one's point. "Please remember," I said, carving my accents on the air with my crabtree stick and looking straight ahead, "please remember that this is not my portrait of you, but only the comment of one woman upon the image of another woman reflected in the eyes of a man who has worn spectacles for many years. But I have another letter—from a novelist; he has a quite different theory of you."
"Is it nice?" asked Cornelia, with a demipirouette and the instinctive capricious smile of a very pretty woman about to step before a mirror. "You should tell me something very nice to offset the spitefulness of that horrid person. But what a silly question! Your letter is from a novelist; so of course it isn't nice. Is it?"
"No," I replied, "I'm afraid it isn't nice—in your sense of the word; but it is interesting—in my sense of the word. I call a thing interesting, you see, when it seems to be earnestly pointing in the direction where truth, like a rabbit, has just disappeared in the bushes. Now, this novelist belongs to the large and productive group of hunters who are leaving the highroad to pursue truth into the underbrush. His theory of you is not a personal reflection upon you; it is only part of his general theory of society and human nature."
"Bah! bah! bah!" Cornelia exclaimed. "I'm sick of human nature—their theories of it, I mean. I love people, but I hate what our current writers say about them. Life is so much more decent, when one knows how to live and whom to live with, than any of our novelists will admit. I have the same feeling in the theatre. I go to a play and see nothing in it that can compare with the quality of real experience—if one has any taste and discrimination. But tell me, now, what does this dreadful creature say about me?"
"Well, I'll take the risk," I said, "since you have the courage or the curiosity to insist on it." I pulled out the second letter. "What he says is this: 'I am afraid your Cornelia is not real. For me, at any rate, she doesn't exist. She isn't elemental. She isn't spontaneous. She strikes me as a theoretical construction to please a Victorian grandmother. Or perhaps I had better call her an old bachelor's pipe dream of a lady. One can't write modern fiction from that point of view. It's insubstantial. We realists have been demonstrating now for years that Judith O'Grady and the Colonel's lady are very much alike beneath the skin. We have destroyed the legend of the lady, and we have destroyed the legend of the gentleman. We have put them out of their misery: they don't exist any more. We're just men and women together. If you don't know Cornelia as a wife, you don't know her—you don't know her as a realist. Women are not like her—not inside. Go beneath the surface, and you'll find the Judith O'Grady in Cornelia.'"
"What nonsense!" cried Cornelia. "What perfect nonsense! Give it to me." And almost snatching the letter from my hand, she tore it into fine shreds, and tossed it showering into a wild currant bush.