The Woman Who Did - Page 13/103

But Alan Merrick, though an excellent fellow in his way, and of

noble fibre, was not quite one of the first, the picked souls of

humanity. He did not count among the finger-posts who point the

way that mankind will travel. Though Herminia always thought him

so. That was her true woman's gift of the highest idealizing

power. Indeed, it adds, to my mind, to the tragedy of Herminia

Barton's life that the man for whom she risked and lost everything

was never quite worthy of her; and that Herminia to the end not

once suspected it. Alan was over thirty, and was still "looking

about him." That alone, you will admit, is a sufficiently grave

condemnation. That a man should have arrived at the ripe age of

thirty and not yet have lighted upon the elect lady--the woman

without whose companionship life would be to him unendurable is in

itself a strong proof of much underlying selfishness, or, what

comes to the same thing, of a calculating disposition. The right

sort of man doesn't argue with himself at all on these matters. He

doesn't say with selfish coldness, "I can't afford a wife;" or, "If

I marry now, I shall ruin my prospects." He feels and acts. He

mates, like the birds, because he can't help himself. A woman

crosses his path who is to him indispensable, a part of himself,

the needful complement of his own personality; and without heed or

hesitation he takes her to himself, lawfully or unlawfully, because

he has need of her. That is how nature has made us; that is how

every man worthy of the name of man has always felt, and thought,

and acted. The worst of all possible and conceivable checks upon

population is the vile one which Malthus glossed over as "the

prudential," and which consists in substituting prostitution for

marriage through the spring-tide of one's manhood.

Alan Merrick, however, was over thirty and still unmarried. More

than that, he was heart-free,--a very evil record. And, like most

other unmarried men of thirty, he was a trifle fastidious. He was

"looking about him." That means to say, he was waiting to find

some woman who suited him. No man does so at twenty. He sees and

loves. But Alan Merrick, having let slip the golden moment when

nature prompts every growing youth to fling himself with pure

devotion at the feet of the first good angel who happens to cross

his path and attract his worship, had now outlived the early flush

of pure passion, and was thinking only of "comfortably settling

himself." In one word, when a man is young, he asks himself with a

thrill what he can do to make happy this sweet soul he loves; when

he has let that critical moment flow by him unseized, he asks only,

in cold blood, what woman will most agreeably make life run smooth

for him. The first stage is pure love; the second, pure

selfishness.