THE OREAD. 11
Subtle Lights Lights and Flashes.
[Read at one of the regular meetings of the Oread Society.]
Long ago, in the city of New York, there was a wedding. A noble, Gold cavalier wedded a bride born of silex and the iridescent beauty of the rainbow, and her name was Opal. They became "two souls with but a single thought," and journeyed far away over mountain and vale and sea to a beautiful new land near a college for young women. This place was so pleasant that they decided to make it their home. For a long time they dwelt in a glass show-case, surrounded by brilliant, flashing diamonds and beautiful pearls, frozen tears shed from the luminous eyes of some sorrowing mermaid.
But one day Fate ordained for them a change, and they were taken in an embossed leather car, lined inside with perfumed velvet, to the suite of rooms occupied by a gay, young college girl. They were not allowed to spend much time in their leather and velvet home, for the young girl preferred to wear them on her hand, where she could see them, instead of hiding them away.
And it came to pass at the end of four years that the sight of the innocent couple, for some unknown reason, offended the eyes of the young girl, and she put them aside and tried to forget many things it was best not to remember. But she had grown to love her gold and opal friends because they were so connected with all her moods and had shared all her thoughts, so that they really knew more of her than anyone else, so she said, "I will keep you in my memory, and you shall go with me and share my joys and comfort me in my sorrows."
Soon she became acquainted with another fair maiden, and as time went on these two became more and more to each other, and friendship assumed a new meaning in their lives. By-and-by the owner of the gold and opal decided to make unto her friend a gift--something that should personify her affection for her friend, and she reflected long on what would be a most suitable token of her affection. Nothing seemed to quite realize her idea until she thought of her ring, so she sent it to her friend, to whom it said silently, "Dear friend, I am sent to be with you always, to tell you of the one who cares so much for you that she sent me, who am her greatest joy, to make you joyful instead."
The friend accepted it gladly, even as she had taken the giver into her heart, and she wrote back saying: "You little knew what you were doing. To you it was only a ring, a dear ring, 'tis true, and associated with many pleasant and sad hours in your past--but had you known how the witchery of the opal and the subtle delicacy of the gold would prove a key to unlock for me all the pages of that past of yours, would you have given it to me just the same?"
Our rings have such an opportunity for getting at our real selves. When we are worried we like to sit and twirl them around our fingers, and there seems to be some soothing power in the gentle motion which drives away the worrying from our hearts. Our rings are with us thus, in glad times and in sad, when we are foolish and when we are wise, when we are vicious and when we come back to our better selves, and the delicate lights gleam caressingly and comfortably about us, or draw away and float out from us in silent condemnation, and the opal and the ring know all about it.
As you see, my friend, it is a very dangerous thing to give your ring to another person, unless, indeed, you are really ready to trust that other with the entire truth about yourself.
It is like giving him your journal to read, only you would never have been as honest with your journal as you have been with your ring; for it is impossible to write down thoughts, however personal, without a sort of inner consciousness that they may be read by some one.
The ring is such a gossip, and as I sit twirling it on my finger, it is fairly chuckling as it thinks of some of the things it has told me, and laughing in its opal sleeve at the memory of others yet to be told. You were always good to those in hard luck, the ring tells me; and that is a good sign, for there is all too little of practical sympathy in the world. We are a selfish lot, and too intent on our own progress or pleasure to step to one's side and help one weaker or less fortunate.
Then the ring tells me of numerous "scrapes"--not bad deeds, only thoughtless, only foolish, and yet there is no limit to folly's harm. In these days the soothing power of the ring was exercised to a great extent, and it tells of a little affair, what you would term an "experience," which we need not record. What college girl but has her shelf of experiences well filled for to repeat a well-worn phrase, "Experience is the name a college student gives to his or her mistakes."
The ring has much to say about your genial, merry-hearted chum, whose sunny influence is still with you--and just here the ring and I stop to moralize a bit on the subject of influence. So often an influence, either good or bad, is exerted unconsciously; we can not come into intimate relations with anyone without influencing and being influenced; and that is an argument in favor of choosing one's friends wisely. That starts another thought; as if one ever chose his friends—-it is as much a matter of ethics, magnetism and all that, as is love; in fact, the love that lasts is only a superstructure with friendship for a foundation. It is all as subtle and intangible as the pale gleam from the opal and as clear as the stone itself. The ring tells of things you regret, and to regret is the first step toward retrieving. It has a poetic vein, too, and tells of boating parties down the bay in the moonlight and of strolls under the great trees on the college campus in the twilight. It grows sad and sorrowful as it tells of the dear friend you lost, and in what painful unbelief you listened when they told you that, "Time cures all sorrows;" and it tells of the severing of ties formed by affection, the farewells to the friends, and alas! alas! to happy, dependent girlhood.
And so you see, dear friend, it is a serious thing to give a friend your ring, for it gives her your past, and it leaves with you the necessity of justifying that past by creating a future; and remember, my friend, we are watching you and talking of you always, the ring and I.
CATHARINE MASTIN.
