My Dear Cornelia/Book 2/Chapter 4
The old road dips here into a hollow, where an extensive thicket of wild roses encroaches upon it and diminishes it to a narrow and thorny footpath. We picked our way through it single-file and in silence. Cornelia, emerging some steps ahead, turned and waited, waist-high behind the briars, smiling—with a rose in her hand and its hue in her face. Suddenly she seemed a long way off—twenty years off. The breeze had brought youth into her eyes if not into her mind. She was very lovely, and I wished the wind might have loosened a wisp—why couldn't it?—of her sunlit hair; but that was too much for the wind. Her own arrangements had been complete.
She fixed the rose in my coat.
"Cornelia," I said, as we footed it again together over the vivid green gloss of dewberry leaves, "You remind me of an old sweetheart of the seventeenth century—who also married a diplomat. I mean Dorothy Osborne. When Temple was courting her, she wrote to him, oh quite delicious letters—one in particular, in which she says she has been crying over the story of Baucis and Philemon. 'Methinks,' she says, 'they were the perfectest characters of a contented marriage, where piety and love were all their wealth, and in their poverty feasted the gods when rich men shut them out.' But in that identical letter she warns her lover that 'this is the world; would you and I were out on't!' And in the next letter she derides the foolish young people who marry for love, and pointedly reminds poor Temple that all the world must be informed 'what fortune you have, and upon what terms I marry you—that both may not be made to appear ten times worse than they are.'"
"Yes—yes; I remember," Cornelia said, with—I thought—a faint note of reverie. "Love and wit met in that encounter, and both came away much improved. I must give that book to my Dorothy. She was a sensible girl—Dorothy Osborne was a very sensible girl. It is a book that will help a young girl to understand that she needn't be an idiot."
"At heart," I said, "even the sweetest of women are as hard as nails, aren't they?"
"Someone has to be," said Cornelia.
"You mean," I interpreted, "if the young lovers aren't to make fools of themselves."
"Yes," she said, "or old ones, either."
"H'm," I resumed; "what I was getting at was this: when I was a young fellow, with even less experience than I have now, I used rather to revel in reading tragedies and tales of dismally bitter and disillusioned men. All young fellows do. I suppose it intensifies the sense of their own existence. In the presence of dark and disastrous things—sin, crime, murder for love, and so on—they persuade themselves that they are drawing close to the 'throbbing heart of reality.'"
"Yes," said Cornelia, "you used to like tragedy."
"But now," I said, "I am following an entirely different clue. I have a theory that the only matter that is really worth investigating is happiness. And so I haunt the trails of people who are reputed to be happy, or who act as if they were happy; and I pester them for their secrets."
"An odious habit," she said. "Besides, you won't learn anything."
"Cornelia," I continued,—not solemnly, you understand, but with my lightest touch,—"are you as entirely happy as we all think you are?"
"You don't imagine that I should tell you if I were not, do you?" she said—this also with the light touch. "Of course I am!"
"Then I suppose that if I asked you to outline the personal characteristics of, let us say, the sort of man one's daughter should choose in order to have a high prospect of a happy marriage—why, then you would just hand me back a quick sketch of His Excellency, your husband, wouldn't you?"
"Of course I should," she replied without hesitation. "I am proud of Oliver. He has made a place for himself in public life. Men like him—he has hosts of men friends; and his relatives are all suitable people. He has been able to provide amply and even lavishly for the comfort of his family, and has given us the advantage of years of foreign travel and residence. He cares a good deal for appearances; but so do I. He likes to live expensively; but he knows how to live. And he is never, like so many men with careers, too busy to live or to let other people live unless they can be swept into the stream of the monster's ambition. He is never too busy to enjoy what he is doing."
"Astonishing virtue, in the circumstances!" groaned my envy.
"And then he is generous to us all—and reasonably tolerant, and really kind-hearted and sympathetic with people that he likes; and he and the children positively adore one another. I like that in him. His temper has its stormy seasons, but for the most part it is gay; and even when he is very angry, he is rather entertaining. He has so much humor that he seldom bores himself, and so much intelligence that he seldom bores anyone else. Everything in the world and at home seems to interest him vividly. He thinks of something new to do or to say every morning of his life. Whatever man or woman he meets, seems to be the one person in the world that he was hoping to meet at that moment; but I think he actually doesn't care very much for women, except in their purely decorative aspects. Sometimes he is a little exacting, but he is generally appreciative; and he has very, very nice ways of remembering birthdays and anniversaries. And then, in tight places he always does the right thing; in a crisis, one can rely on him."
"Cornelia," I said, clipping a row of flame-weed with my stick, as we quickened our pace, "I have just passed through a terrible minute. You know that Oliver is the only man in the world that I envy. I have been checking off each trait of his against my own, and the only trait that I have in common with this happiness-producing paragon is that my temper, too, has 'stormy seasons.'"
"That's too bad," Cornelia said maliciously, "for I don't consider Oliver's temper his best trait."
"No, nor do I; you omitted the finest virtue of the perfect American husband. What I admire most of all in Oliver is his sending you into the country for the summer—and his sublime confidence that he will get you back again in the fall."
"The quiet is nice here, isn't it?" she said; "but hadn't we better turn about? The sun is slipping into that indigo cloud-bank."