"Poor thing!" says society, putting up its eyeglass to scan admiringly the beautiful heroine of the latest aristocratic scandal--"she had such a brute of a husband! No wonder she liked that DEAR Lord So-and-So! Very wrong of her, of course, but she is so young! She was married at sixteen--quite a child!--could not have known her own mind!"
The husband alluded to might have been the best and most chivalrous of men--anything but a "brute"--yet he always figures as such somehow, and gets no sympathy. And, by the way, it is rather a notable fact that all the beautiful, famous, or notorious women were "married at sixteen." How is this managed? I can account for it in southern climates, where girls are full-grown at sixteen and old at thirty--but I cannot understand its being the case in England, where a "miss" of sixteen is a most objectionable and awkward ingenue, without any of the "charms wherewith to charm," and whose conversation is always vapid and silly to the point of absolute exhaustion on the part of those who are forced to listen to it. These sixteen-year-old marriages are, however, the only explanation frisky English matrons can give for having such alarmingly prolific families of tall sons and daughters, and it is a happy and convenient excuse--one that provides a satisfactory reason for the excessive painting of their faces and dyeing of their hair. Being young (as they so nobly assert), they wish to look even younger. A la bonne heure! If men cannot see through the delicate fiction, they have only themselves to blame. As for me, I believe in the old, old, apparently foolish legend of Adam and Eve's sin and the curse which followed it--the curse on man is inevitably carried out to this day. God said: "BECAUSE" (mark that BECAUSE!) "thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife" (or thy WOMAN, whoever she be), "and hast eaten of the tree of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it" (the tree or fruit being the evil suggested FIRST to man by woman), "cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life!"
True enough! The curse is upon all who trust woman too far--the sorrow upon all who are beguiled by her witching flatteries. Of what avail her poor excuse in the ancient story--"The serpent beguiled me and I did eat!" Had she never listened she could not have been beguiled. The weakness, the treachery, was in herself, and is there still. Through everything the bitterness of it runs. The woman tempts--the man yields--and the gate of Eden--the Eden of a clear conscience and an untrammeled soul, is shut upon them. Forever and ever the Divine denunciation re-echoes like muttering thunder through the clouds of passing generations; forever and ever we unconsciously carry it out in our own lives to its full extent till the heart grows sick and the brain weary, and we long for the end of it all, which is death--death, that mysterious silence and darkness at which we sometimes shudder, wondering vaguely--Can it be worse than life?