Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/306

 nd indeed"--and Uncle John's face assumed its strange smile, which seemed to take you, as it were, suddenly behind the scenes, to show you the wrong side of the tapestry,--"and indeed," he continued, "when I look back on the times in my life that I should have died, when it was fitting and proper to die, when I felt that dying would be such a trump card to play, if only I could manage it, I must say that I am glad now that it was beyond my power to arrange things according to the melodramatic rules. As it is, I am alive now. I shake my fist at all the ghosts of my departed tragedies and say, 'I am worth two of you. I am alive. I have all the chances of the future in my favor.'"

Here he caught sight of Alice's wide-opened eyes, and his smile changed into his own genial laugh, as he kissed her forehead and went on.

"That was a little aside, Alice, made to my other self, my metaphysical man,--not meant at all for my audience. I was meditating a lecture on the causes of conjugal happiness, but I seem to have stumbled upon a knot in the very first unwinding of the thread of my discourse."

"I'll listen to the lecture, Uncle, though I see but one simple and all-sufficient cause for my happiness."

"That Herbert loves you, ha? Know, my pretty neophyte, that happiness, married happiness especially, does not come from being loved, but from loving. What says our Coleridge?

"'For still the source, not fountain, gives The daily food on which Love lives.'

"And he is right, although you shake your curls. In most marriages, in all that are not matters of convenience, one party has a stronger heart, will, character, than the other. And that one loves the most from the very necessity of his nature, and, loving most, is the happier. The other falls, after a while, into a passive state, becomes the mere recipient of love, and finds his or her happiness in something else, or perhaps does not find it at all."

"Neither side would satisfy me, Uncle John; I hardly know which fate would be the more terrible. Do you think I would accept such a compromise in exchange for all I am living and feeling now? I would rather be miserable at once than so half-happy."

"But, my darling, Colin and Chloe cannot spend their whole lives singing madrigals and stringing daisies. It is not in human nature to support, for any length of time, such superhuman bliss. The time will come when Colin will find no more rhymes to 'dove,' and when Chloe will tire of hearing the same one. It is possible that Herbert will some time tire of reading Shelley to you,--nay, it is even possible that the time may come when you will tire of hearing him; it is of that time I would talk. The present is as perfectly satisfactory to me as to you and Herbert, though not exactly in the same degree."

"Well, Uncle, what is your advice to Chloe disillusioned,--if you insist that such a thing must be?"

"Simply this, my own dear little child," answered Uncle John, and his voice took almost a solemn tone in its deep tenderness,--"when that time comes, as come it must, do not worry your husband with idle regrets for the past; remember that the husband is not the lover; remember that your sex love through your imagination, and look always for that clothing and refining of passion with sentiment, which, with us, belong only to the poetry and chivalry of youthful ardor. We may love you as well afterward,--nay, we may love you a great deal better,--but we cannot take the trouble of telling you so every day; we expect you to believe it once for all; and you,--you like to hear it over and over again, and, not hearing it, you begin to fancy it no longer true, and fall to trying experiments on your happiness. A fatal error this, Alice. There is nothing that men so often enjoy as the simply being let alone; but not one woman in a hundred can be made to believe in such a strange enjoyment. Then the wife becomes _exigeante_ and impatient, and the husband, aft