Part 5 (1/2)
[Sidenote: The Lover's Devotion]
Thus it seems to women that men love spasmodically--that the lover's devotion is a series of unrelated acts based upon momentary impulse, rather than a steady purpose. They forget that the heart may need more rest than the interval between beats.
[Sidenote: Attraction and Repulsion]
If a man and woman who truly loved each other were cast away upon a desert island, he would tire of her long before she wearied of him. The sequence of attraction and repulsion, the ultimate balance of positive and negative, are familiar electrical phenomena. Is it unreasonable to suppose that the supreme form of attraction is governed by the same law?
Strong attractions frequently begin with strong repulsions, sometimes mutual, but more often on the part of the attracting force. A man seldom develops a violent and inexplicable hatred for a woman and later finds that it has unaccountably changed to love.
Yet a woman often marries a man she has sincerely hated, and the explanation is simple enough, perhaps, for a woman never hates a man unless he is in some sense her master. Love and hate are kindred pa.s.sions with a woman and the depth of the one is the possible measure of the other.
She is wise who fully understands her weapon of coquetry. She will send her lover from her at the moment his love is strongest, and he will often seek her in vain. She will be parsimonious with her letters and caresses and thus keep her attraction at its height. If he is forever unsatisfied, he will always be her lover, for satiety must precede repulsion.
No woman need fear the effect of absence upon the man who honestly loves her. The needle of the compa.s.s, regardless of intervening seas, points forever toward the north. Pitiful indeed is she who fails to be a magnet and blindly becomes a chain.
The age has brought with it woman's desire for equality, at least in the matter of love. She wishes to be as free to seek a man as he is to seek her--to love him as freely and frankly as he does her. Why should she withhold her lips after her heart has surrendered? Why should she keep the pretence of coyness long after she has been won?
[Sidenote: The Old, Old Law]
Far beneath the tinsel of our restless age lies the old, old law, and she who scorns it does so at the peril of all she holds most dear.
Legislation may at times be disobeyed, but never law, for the breaking brings swift punishment of its own.
Too often a generous-hearted woman makes the mistake of full revelation.
She wishes him to understand her every deed, her every thought. Nothing is left to his imagination--the innermost corners of her heart are laid bare. Given the woman and the circ.u.mstances, he would infallibly know her action. This is why the husbands of the ”practical,” the ”methodical,” and the ”reasonable” women may be tender and devoted, but are never lovers after marriage.
If Alexander had been a woman, he would not have sighed for more worlds to conquer--woman asks but one. If his world had been a clever woman he would have had no time for alien planets, because a man will never lose his interest in a woman while his conquest is incomplete.
The woman who is most tenderly loved and whose husband is still her lover, carefully conceals from him the fact that she is fully won. There is always something he has yet to gain.
[Sidenote: A Carmen at Heart]
After ten years of marriage, if the old relation remains the same, it is because she is a Carmen at heart. She is alluring, tempting, cajoling and scorning in the same breath; at once tender and commanding, inspiring both love and fear, baffling and eluding even while she is leading him on.
She gives him veiled hints of her real personality, but he never penetrates her mask. Could he see for an instant into the secret depths of her soul, he would understand that her concealment and her coquetry, her mystery and her charm, are nothing but her love, playing a desperate game against Time and man's nature, for the dear stake of his own.
Dumas draws a fine distinction when he says: ”A man may have two pa.s.sions but never two loves: whoever has loved twice has never loved at all.” If this is true, the dividing line is so exceedingly fine that it is beyond woman's understanding, and it may be surmised that even man does not fully realise it until he is old and grey.
[Sidenote: The Cords of Memory]
Yet somewhere, in every man's heart, is hidden a woman's face. To that inner chamber no other image ever finds its way. The cords of memory which hold it are strong as steel and as tender as the heart-fibre of which they are made.
There is no time in his life when those eyes would not thrill him and those lips make him tremble--no hour when the sound of that voice would not summon him like a trumpet-call.
No loyalty or allegiance is powerful enough to smother it within his own heart, in spite of the conditions to which he may outwardly conform.
Other pa.s.sions may temporarily hide it even from his own sight, yet in reality it is supreme, from the day of its birth to the door of his grave.