The months since her father's death spread into the second year
before Stephen began to realise the loneliness of her life. She had
no companion now but her aunt; and though the old lady adored her,
and she returned her love in full, the mere years between them made
impossible the companionship that youth craves. Miss Rowly's life
was in the past. Stephen's was in the future. And loneliness is a
feeling which comes unbidden to a heart.
Stephen felt her loneliness all round. In old days Harold was always
within hail, and companionship of equal age and understanding was
available. But now his very reticence in her own interest, and by
her father's wishes, made for her pain. Harold had put his strongest
restraint on himself, and in his own way suffered a sort of silent
martyrdom. He loved Stephen with every fibre of his being. Day by
day he came toward her with eager step; day by day he left her with a
pang that made his heart ache and seemed to turn the brightness of
the day to gloom. Night by night he tossed for hours thinking,
thinking, wondering if the time would ever come when her kisses would
be his . . . But the tortures and terrors of the night had their
effect on his days. It seemed as if the mere act of thinking, of
longing, gave him ever renewed self-control, so that he was able in
his bearing to carry out the task he had undertaken: to give Stephen
time to choose a mate for herself. Herein lay his weakness--a
weakness coming from his want of knowledge of the world of women.
Had he ever had a love affair, be it never so mild a one, he would
have known that love requires a positive expression. It is not
sufficient to sigh, and wish, and hope, and long, all to oneself.
Stephen felt instinctively that his guarded speech and manner were
due to the coldness--or rather the trusting abated worship--of the
brotherhood to which she had been always accustomed. At the time
when new forces were manifesting and expanding themselves within her;
when her growing instincts, cultivated by the senses and the passions
of young nature, made her aware of other forces, new and old,
expanding themselves outside her; at the time when the heart of a
girl is eager for new impressions and new expansions, and the calls
of sex are working within her all unconsciously, Harold, to whom her
heart would probably have been the first to turn, made himself in his
effort to best show his love, a quantite negligeable.
Thus Stephen, whilst feeling that the vague desires of budding
womanhood were trembling within her, had neither thought nor
knowledge of their character or their ultimate tendency. She would
have been shocked, horrified, had that logical process, which she
applied so freely to less personal matters, been used upon her own
intimate nature. In her case logic would of course act within a
certain range; and as logic is a conscious intellectual process, she
became aware that her objective was man. Man--in the abstract.
'Man,' not 'a man.' Beyond that, she could not go. It is not too
much to say that she did not ever, even in her most errant thought,
apply her reasoning, or even dream of its following out either the
duties, the responsibilities, or the consequences of having a
husband. She had a vague longing for younger companionship, and of
the kind naturally most interesting to her. There thought stopped.
One only of her male acquaintances did not at this time appear.
Leonard Everard, who had some time ago finished his course at
college, was living partly in London and partly on the Continent.
His very absence made him of added interest to his old play-fellow.
The image of his grace and comeliness, of his dominance and masculine
force, early impressed on her mind, began to compare favourably with
the actualities of her other friends; those of them at least who were
within the circle of her personal interest. 'Absence makes the heart
grow fonder.' In Stephen's mind had been but a very mustard-seed of
fondness. But new lights were breaking for her; and all of them, in
greater or lesser degree, shone in turn on the memory of the pretty
self-willed dominant boy, who now grew larger and more masculine in
stature under the instance of each successive light. Stephen knew
the others fairly well through and through. The usual mixture of
good and evil, of strength and weakness, of purpose and vacillation,
was quite within the scope of her own feeling and of her observation.
But this man was something of a problem to her; and, as such, had a
prominence in her thoughts quite beyond his own worthiness.
In movement of some form is life; and even ideas grow when the pulses
beat and thought quickens. Stephen had long had in her mind the idea
of sexual equality. For a long time, in deference to her aunt's
feelings, she had not spoken of it; for the old lady winced in
general under any suggestion of a breach of convention. But though
her outward expression being thus curbed had helped to suppress or
minimise the opportunities of inward thought, the idea had never left
her. Now, when sex was, consciously or unconsciously, a dominating
factor in her thoughts, the dormant idea woke to new life. She had
held that if men and women were equal the woman should have equal
rights and opportunities as the man. It had been, she believed, an
absurd conventional rule that such a thing as a proposal of marriage
should be entirely the prerogative of man.
And then came to her, as it ever does to woman, opportunity.
Opportunity, the cruelest, most remorseless, most unsparing, subtlest
foe that womanhood has. Here was an opportunity for her to test her
own theory; to prove to herself, and others, that she was right.
They--'they' being the impersonal opponents of, or unbelievers in,
her theory--would see that a woman could propose as well as a man;
and that the result would be good.
It is a part of self-satisfaction, and perhaps not the least
dangerous part of it, that it has an increasing or multiplying power
of its own. The desire to do increases the power to do; and desire
and power united find new ways for the exercise of strength. Up to
now Stephen's inclination towards Leonard had been vague, nebulous;
but now that theory showed a way to its utilisation it forthwith
began to become, first definite, then concrete, then substantial.
When once the idea had become a possibility, the mere passing of time
did the rest.
Her aunt saw--and misunderstood. The lesson of her own youth had not
been applied; not even of those long hours and days and weeks at
which she hinted when she had spoken of the tragedy of life which by
inference was her own tragedy: 'to love and to be helpless. To
wait, and wait, and wait, with your heart all aflame!'
Stephen recognised her aunt's concern for her health in time to
protect herself from the curiosity of her loving-kindness. Her youth
and readiness and adaptability, and that power of play-acting which
we all have within us and of which she had her share, stood to her.
With but little effort, based on a seeming acquiescence in her aunt's
views, she succeeded in convincing the old lady that her incipient
feverish cold had already reached its crisis and was passing away.
But she had gained certain knowledge in the playing of her little
part. All this self-protective instinct was new; for good or ill she
had advanced one more step in not only the knowledge but the power of
duplicity which is so necessary in the conventional life of a woman.
Oh! did we but see! Could we but see! Here was a woman, dowered in
her youth with all the goods and graces in the power of the gods to
bestow, who fought against convention; and who yet found in
convention the strongest as well as the readiest weapon of defence.
For nearly two weeks Stephen's resolution was held motionless,
neither advancing nor receding; it was veritably the slack water of
her resolution. She was afraid to go on. Not afraid in sense of
fear as it is usually understood, but with the opposition of virginal
instincts; those instincts which are natural, but whose uses as well
as whose powers are unknown to us.
