Part 38 (1/2)

”Poor cooks and dressmakers!” murmured Professor Fortescue, ”where are _their_ serenities and urbanities?”

”I would not deprive any person of the good things of life,” cried Valeria; ”but at present, it is only a few who can appreciate and contribute to the delicate essence that I speak of. I don't think one could expect it of one's cook, after all.”

”One is mad to expect anything of those who have had no chance,” said Professor Fortescue. ”That nevertheless we consistently do,--or what amounts to the same thing: we plume ourselves on what chance has enabled us to be and to achieve, as if between us and the less fortunate there were some great difference of calibre and merit. Nine times in ten, there is nothing between us but luck.”

”Oh, dear, you _are_ democratic, Professor!” cried Lady Engleton.

”No; I am merely trying to be just.”

”To be just you must apply your theory to men and women, as well as to cla.s.s and cla.s.s,” Valeria suggested.

”_Mon Dieu!_ but so I do; so I always have done, as soon as I was intellectually short-coated.”

”And would you excuse all our weaknesses on that ground?” asked Lady Engleton, with a somewhat ingratiating upward gaze of her blue eyes.

”I would account for them as I would account for the weaknesses of my own s.e.x. As for excusing, the question of moral responsibility is too involved to be decided off-hand.”

The atmosphere of Griffin-land, as Professor Theobald called it, while becoming to his character, made him a little recklessly frank at times.

He admitted that throughout his varied experience of life, he had found flattery the most powerful weapon in a skilled hand, and that he had never known it fail. He related instances of the signal success which had followed its application with the trowel. He reminded his listeners of Lord Beaconsfield's famous saying, and chuckled over the unfortunate woman, ”plain as a pike-staff,” who had become his benefactress, in consequence of a discreet allusion to the ”power of beauty” and a well-placed sigh.

”The woman must have been a fool!” said Joseph Fleming.

”By no means; she was of brilliant intellect. But praises of that were tame to her; she knew her force, and was perhaps tired of the solitude it induced.” Professor Theobald laughed mightily at his own sarcasm.

”But when the whisper of 'beauty' came stealing to her ear (which was by no means like a sh.e.l.l) it was surpa.s.sing sweet to her. I think there is no yearning more intense than that of a clever woman for the triumphs of mere beauty. She would give all her powers of intellect for the smallest tribute to personal and feminine charm. What is your verdict, Mrs.

Temperley?”

Mrs. Temperley supposed that clever women had something of human nature in them, and valued overmuch what they did not possess.

Professor Theobald had perhaps looked for an answer that would have betrayed more of the speaker's secret feelings.

”It is the fas.h.i.+on, I know,” he said, ”to regard woman as an enigma.

Now, without professing any unusual acuteness, I believe that this is a mistake. Woman is an enigma certainly, because she is human, but that ends it. Her conditions have tended to cultivate in her the power of dissimulation, and the histrionic quality, just as the peaceful ilex learns to put forth thorns if you expose it to the attacks of devouring cattle. It is this instinct to develop thorns in self-defence, and yet to live a little behind the p.r.i.c.kly outposts, that leads to our notion of mystery in woman's nature. Let a man's subsistence and career be subject to the same powers and chances as the success of a woman's life now hangs on, and see whether he too does not become a histrionic enigma.”

Professor Fortescue observed that the clergy, at times, developed qualities called feminine, because in some respects their conditions resembled those of women.

Theobald a.s.sented enthusiastically to this view. He had himself entered the church as a young fellow (let not Mrs. Temperley look so inconsiderately astonished), and had left it on account of being unable to conscientiously subscribe to its tenets.

”But not before I had acquired some severe training in that sort of strategy which is inc.u.mbent upon women, in the conduct of their lives.

Whatever I might privately think or feel, my office required that I should only express that which would be more or less grateful to my hearers. (Is not this the woman's case, in almost every position in life?) Even orthodoxy must trip it on tiptoe; there was always some prejudice, some susceptibility to consider. What was frankness in others was imprudence in me; other men's minds might roam at large; mine was tethered, if not in its secret movements, at least in its utterance; and it is a curious and somewhat sinister law of Nature, that perpetual denial of utterance ends by killing the power or the feeling so held in durance.”

Hadria coloured.

”That experience and its effect upon my own nature, which has lasted to this day,” added Theobald, ”served to increase my interest in the fascinating study of character in its relation to environment.”

”Ah!” exclaimed Hadria, ”then _you_ don't believe in the independent power of the human will?”

”Certainly not. To talk of character overcoming circ.u.mstance is to talk of an effect without a cause. Yet this phrase is a mere commonplace in our speech. A man no more overcomes his circ.u.mstance than oxygen overcomes nitrogen when it combines with it to form the air we breathe.