THE DISAPPOINTED SPINSTER
Though I have always disputed the truth of the proverb that “the tailor makes the man”—since the more fashionably I am dressed the less I feel of my individual manhood—I am perfectly sure that the lover, not the dressmaker, makes the woman. As he pulls the strings of her heart, so can he shape her life, and according as he makes her love react upon herself with joy or sorrow, so can he develop the tendencies of her temperament, and, through all circumstances, bring out the sweet or the sour in her nature. Disappointment in love will embitter the cynical-minded woman as no mere loss of fortune could, and make her constantly aggressive in her attitude towards both her own and the opposite sex; whereas, to the woman of gentle faith, it will simply lend the crown of patient sisterhood with all men and all women, nor will it in the least destroy her faith in the beautiful beneficence of the natural order of marriage. If you hear a spinster who has passed her thirtieth year inveighing in set and bitter terms against the joys and advantages of the married state, be sure she has had her matrimonial opportunity and missed it, while she gave the love of her girlhood to a “detrimental.”
Miss Singleton is in the “fallen leaf” age, for the sweet blossom-time of girlhood has long since passed her by, and she has now seen some thirty-five summers. Yet in many respects she is as young as ever, and when she goes out to a dance she has no lack of partners—and the best dancers too, mind you—while on the tennis court she is always in much demand. For she plays tennis with an activity and a style that would put “sweet seventeen” to the blush, and the rhythm and the vigour of her waltzing have outlived the practical admiration of almost two decades of partners. Indeed, not having the natural stress of motherhood to bear, like those women who are wives, Miss Singleton’s physical energy and need of active excitement still find vent in these pursuits, perhaps with more zest even than in the days of her girlhood.
See her on the tennis court. She is completely absorbed in the game, mentally and physically, and any mistake on her own part, or bad stroke on the part of her partner, provokes her to irritability. It is something more than a mere game to her, it is the supreme life-interest of the moment. She must play up with all her might and main; for life is long and youth is fleeting, and while she can still run about, and make swift, sure strokes with her racquet, she can make-believe to herself that she is not getting passée; but to give up dancing and tennis would be to confess herself at once an old maid—horrible thought, and quite absurd.
Why, look at her as she enters a ball-room. Perhaps there is just a suspicion of weariness and contemptuous discontent in her countenance, but, the moment she is recognised, a crowd of youths collect around her clamouring for her card, and soon she is all aglow with the excitement of the dance and the amusing admiration of the dancing men. They are only ingenuous youths, though, you will observe, or men who regard women’s society as a mere pastime. They are not the marrying men, not men who are seeking the companionship and comfort of a wife. Those are to be found dancing with or talking to the young girls, whose characters are not yet formed by time and experience, who are therefore the more malleable for the magnanimities of marriage, its responsibilities, its sacrifices, and its necessity for mutual give and take. There is no sign of malleability about Miss Singleton; there might have been once, ere the gentleness of hopeful girlhood had been turned to the hardness of disappointed womanhood. But now men do not think of her as a possible wife, or if they do it is negatively. “I like that Miss Singleton; she dances splendidly, and can give you an answer back; says devilish smart things too, but I pity any one who married her: she would soon let him see who was master, and it wouldn’t be he.”
Yes, Miss Singleton would require a very clever, strong, and determined man to bring her into matrimonial harmony now. She has acquired too much of the habit of self-reliance and self-assertion; a long course of fruitless flirtation, in which she has fenced both with experts and with amateurs, has caused her to assume towards men always an attitude of defiant defence, besides, the restlessness born of an unsatisfied life has become chronic with her. She is never content to remain at home: her craving for amusement and excitement is unceasing, and strangers rather than those who belong to her home-circle always claim her first attention.
However charming and amusing she may be in society, at home she keeps everything in a ferment, and she is contented with nothing. She domineers over her parents, as well as over her brothers and sisters, her cousins, and intimate friends. She captiously criticises whatever they do, and wishes to rearrange and direct everything. She is jealous of her relatives and friends who marry, though she constantly avers that nothing would ever induce her to take unto herself a husband, that the idea of a woman giving up her personal independence and freedom to a man is absolutely repulsive to her, while she professes a sort of contemptuous pity for all those who do voluntarily fall into this degrading condition. “Marriage is a snare for the weak-minded, and a delusion for fools,” she will tell you, and she will pretend that she believes it.
But it was not always so. When I first knew Kate Singleton she was a bright, sympathetic girl of eighteen, and I envied the man who should some day call her his wife. She had certainly both will and character, but these were tempered by true womanly sensibility, and a good and magnanimous man’s love might have helped her to develop into a delightful woman and an excellent wife. Unfortunately, however, the romantic element in her nature was appealed to by the fascinations of a man who was not good, though he understood women’s weaknesses fatally well, and knew how to simulate the qualities that would most readily appeal to any particular girl. The cynical would perhaps excuse him with that cheap and common plea which covers so much of the wrong done in this world: “He was no worse than other men.” He had certainly committed no crime; only he had lived fast, perhaps a little faster than most men of his age. But he was a handsome young man, with a very engaging manner, a generous income, and many temptations; so, of course, it did not take him long to spend his patrimony, though he enjoyed its full value in luxurious pastimes and dissipation. Then, having nothing but debts and a rake’s reputation to his name, he endeavoured to make matrimonial capital out of his good looks and personal fascination. He met Kate Singleton, whose father he had understood would give her a handsome dowry, and perceiving the vulnerable place in her affections, he appealed to her sympathies through the story of his troubles and temptations. He worked with such infinite care and such insidious art, while he simulated the reckless, generous impulses of a simple-minded, honest-hearted hero of melodrama, that she gave her entire love to him, and became his promised wife. Her parents opposed the marriage, seeing facts with the eyes of experience, but she held to her determination, defiantly proclaimed her faith in the man of her choice, and fought in defence of her love as fiercely as a lioness defends her cubs. Then all her womanhood was aroused, and mind and feeling put forth their strength for love had waked the heroine in her, and the spirit of romance exercised its magic influence upon her life.
But the truth broke upon her with sudden cruelty. In an unguarded moment of anxiety concerning her wedding portion, should she succeed in obtaining her parents’ consent, the lover revealed the mercenary motive of his wooing. Her pride was wounded, her love insulted, and by this lightning-shock all her better, truer self was blighted in its growth. All the taunts that she had endured in defence of her love, all the sanctity of feeling laid bare to the callous stare of this man, recoiled upon her like the backwash of a wave of bitter waters, turning all her sweetness sour. Then she grew to mistrust all men because of the falseness of that one, and for a time she really set her face against marriage, and that, too, when her face had yet the bloom of girlhood upon it.
After a while, however, there came in her life an Indian summer of love-longings and marriage-hopes, but by that time the bitterness of doubt and disappointment had hardened the tone of her voice, drawn her mouth to a set sternness, and tainted her mind with cynicism. So now, though there be plenty to flirt with her, there be none who strive to lure back the softness of her nature through the gentle persuasion of love, and no doubt she has recognised this, for she always pretends to laugh at sentiment, and to regard emotion as a species of hysteria. But once I chanced to notice her while a girl, with a voice that sounded like the very incarnation of music—she was singing a simple, pathetic little folk-song.
It was out in a garden on a summer’s night, “and music and moonlight and feeling were one,” and, as Kate Singleton sat in the shadow of a tree, the tears rolled down her cheek, and I am sure that a sympathetic wooer might then have struck the vein of true womanliness in her with all the old softness, all the old lovableness of girlhood. But the melting mood was brief, for soon afterwards, in the gaslight of the drawing room, there were no traces of tears on her face, no gentle signs in her voice of a recent “session of sweet silent thought.” She was busily challenging to flirtation a man whom she had artfully taken from the side of a pretty young girl to whom his words were as honey. It was a petty episode quite unworthy of her, for at best the conquest would be but for an evening, while it would cause the young girl a real heart-pang. But this was one of the atoms of excitement that make her life tolerable to her; her dominant desire is to make men feel the pangs of unreturned love, or, failing that, her pleasure is to flirt with them up to a point and then to turn round and snub them. This affords her amusement as well as vent for bitterness of feeling.
Some unmarried women can soothe their solitary souls with charity of act and feeling, and bless other people’s lives with their benevolence, thus directing the love and sympathy that one man has missed into the wider channel of philanthropy. But these, possibly, have never been crossed in love, or, if they have, they are the women of whom the silent, uncomplaining martyrs of the world are made. Miss Singleton, however, is none of these. She cannot forgive, especially as she finds it impossible to forget.
But, after all, what is to be Miss Singleton’s ultimate aim in life? She cannot fill her whole existence with dances, tennis, and flirtations, for time will have something serious to say on that subject. Say she is five-and-thirty now; in another five years she will have leisure from her present pastimes to realise her want of new interests. She may not personally feel that age is creeping on apace, but she will be made sensible of the fact by all kinds of external signs. She will find that, though the marriages of her brothers and sisters, and other contemporaries of her girlhood, at first made little difference in their attitude towards her, the increasing and growing-up of their families make a very great difference, and, naturally, the interest that is taken in herself must under these conditions become gradually lessened. A new generation of girls will have ousted her from the arena of flirtation, for the spinster of forty stands but little chance against the girl of twenty, though her wit be twenty times as great, and her charms be all the more telling for long practice. And then her interests will become narrower as her field of interest is reduced in dimensions by the encroachments of time and its consequences, until an utter sense of loneliness and uncaredforness sets in, and then—God help her!
But I would let Miss Singleton’s story point a moral for all spinsters. Because one man gave her a bitter draught to swallow, she allowed herself to believe, until too late, that there was no more sweetness in the world; because one man proved false, she withdrew her faith from all men; and so she has missed the blessings of domestic love, the wife’s happiness, the mother’s joys, and so some good man has missed a good wife.