My Dear Cornelia/Book 2/Chapter 6
The foam was now running high up the beach. I splashed straight through it, in spite of my shoes. But Cornelia, lighter footed, danced with it like a partner in some fantastic minuet, returning to my side and my argument only when the creamy gliding meander ebbed.
"A man's power to impart his best self," I said, "depends on the woman's power to receive it."
"Of course," said Cornelia, "all that any man, even a genius, asks of his wife is intelligence enough to appreciate him."
"No," I said, "that isn't true. That is going by. There was a time when a husband thought of himself as the pianist, and of his wife as standing behind him to turn the pages of his music. But nowadays we begin to think that the ideal concert is by two performers on perfectly synchronized independent instruments—not soloist and accompanist but, say, organist and pianist, each as important as the other."
"Nonsense!" said Cornelia, "We shall never expect that. But we do like our accompaniment to be applauded when we play well—and especially when we don't."
"If there is one subject in the world," I said, veering a point, "about which I am more densely ignorant than another, it is women, and what they really like."
"That's quite true," she lilted.
"But I knew a lady once—"
"Still another lady?"
"A most exquisite lady. And I often wondered why, whenever 'the idea of her life' came into my 'study of imagination', I invariably saw her in a setting, as if the setting were an organic part of herself."
"Well it is, isn't it—if one puts a little effort into it to make it right? It is in the setting—isn't it—that one has one's opportunity to express what you call the self. It is in one's husband, children, friends, and one's home and habits and things and so on."
"Yes, but in the case of this lady there was a curious point about the setting. Wherever she was, seemed to be the centre of the picture. She always seemed to frame."
"What an attitudinizer she must have been!"
"She was not. It was only, I think, that she seemed to bring out and accentuate everything near her that harmonized with her own vibrant and articulate life. When I saw her in her drawing-room, it framed her; and she appeared as fine and finished as if she had stepped from a canvas of Watteau's. Her books and pictures and tapestries became as intimately hers as her garments, so that I have felt her almost visibly present in that room, even when she was not there. Sometimes, in a perverse mood, I have said, 'This is all a pose'; and, trying to go behind the elaborate expressiveness of her artificial surroundings and to tease her out of perfection, I have gone on rough walks with her in woods and in the open, half hoping that she might revert to the inarticulate pathos of Nature. But the instant she stepped from the frame of art she stepped into the frame of the landscape; the greensward spread itself before her like Raleigh's cloak; groves offered themselves for a background; and I finally concluded that if she came up out of the sea, like Botticelli's Cytherea, the sea would clothe her and her pearly radiance appear but an extension of the lustrous nacre of some deep-sea shell."
"You are fanciful," said Cornelia.
"I am not fanciful," I replied. "I express just as simply as I can with words my sense of the quite blessed outwardness and availability of this lady's self. I don't think she knew it, but—"
"But that shows how ignorant you are of women," she said, and swept me again sidelong with her gray eyes.
"But whether she knew it or not," I reasoned, "she possesses a secret of communicating happiness—a kind of happiness which I can only describe as pure serenity at concert pitch. Perhaps she was merely born in tune with some fine instrument which the rest of us rarely hear. Perhaps she is right, after all, in thinking of the art and discipline of the traditional lady and the traditional gentleman as the technique by which the true and precious selves of our fellow creatures are most likely to get themselves expressed."
"I believe," said Cornelia, "that your theory is coming out rather well, and in time for tea."
"My only reason for elaborating my theory is, that it is based upon the practice of a lady whose theory is infinitely surpassed by her art."
"Is it, indeed?" she said.
"When I got the theory built, I was planning to say that I should wish a daughter to choose for her husband neither one of the sheik-monsters who of late have been devouring our damsels, nor yet the inexpressive and unmodified vestryman whom you commended to our admiration this morning, but rather a youth who should have a bit of the old bachelor's conception of what might be in the relation—an old bachelor, I mean, who had known in his own youth, an exquisite lady."
"Why lug in the old bachelor?" Cornelia asked—a little cruelly; for we were already at her door.
"Because," I said, as she waited on the step for my leave-taking, "because time and meditation and the naturalistic novelists have convinced him that, almost without a pang, he may resign to Mr. O'Grady and the Colonel the similarities of Judith and the lady, provided only that, from time to time, he may refresh his memory and his senses with the lady's differences."
"Meaning—"
"Why, meaning that the kind of man whom a girl like Dorothy should choose should know that the passion hymned by the naturalists is naught, sheer naught—"
"You really mean that?"
"—in comparison with the quality of love to be had in its high moments of general joyous awareness of the entire radiant life of a fellow being—meeting his perceptions and recorded in his imagination, clothed in color and motion and talk and laughter and fresh air, the head turning with frank gay light in the eyes, the lips parted in speech, while the springing step goes rhythmically over the wide-stretching earth under sunlight and blue heavens."
"It will be a long time," said Cornelia, "before Dorothy needs to trouble her head with that. Meanwhile, we shall occupy ourselves with the rudiments. Shall we see you at mail-time to-morrow?"
"Yes," I said, "and we'll take up Oliver's case, perhaps. There's going to be a fine sunset. 'Voir!"