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242 there hovers the gleam of past sweet hours; when they really are mothers there is a conflict, they find it so hard to avoid becoming or remaining somebody's mistress. Women who can love only once, who give themselves completely and perish thereby, because they are unable to see how in this world there could be room for anything beyond their own wonderfully internal experiences. Others who take nothing much to heart, who never think of a safe little corner or a permanent happiness, who suffer from neither satiety of sensation nor from disappointments, giving and receiving pleasure, gliding from one person to another with a natural grace, often without noticing the enormous events through which they pass or for which they are responsible, and absolutely incapable of surprise or embarrassment at these events or at themselves; they are innocents rather than prostitutes, each time virginal anew, and yet sufferable solely through the childishness and the ease with which they can love and surrender. Still others who are duly conscious and are plagued with their consciousness, who hunger after and wish to be hungered after, but lack the courage to follow their feelings regardless of the false, unjust morality which denies to women what is granted to men; and they are punished if they do make this show of courage for once, not suspecting in their haste that they may be committing the one and only sin in not being worth the great mystery which is signalized in the junction of man and woman; because it was not the chosen man, but someone casually desired to whom the surrender was made, in an hour of lust rather than of that authentic love which is heavy with the great secret and stretches along the endless chain of creation. Then again, men who have known the true in life, who are lost to the world, who renounce everything external, action, fame, wealth, and honour, and simply tinker the more with human souls; after much stumbling and groping they have finally come into their own, and assert their true being, their real calling, will no longer be diverted by alloys or allurements, will hardly even be aroused. But the most are those who live, not with a purpose, but beautifully. Men of the metropolis and of luxury, themselves the losers in their game, caught in their sport of love, sorrow, truth and folly, seem and be, life and death, unfit for growing old—torturing themselves with ill-humour and bitterness when youth begins to decline—unpathetic, lacking in full-throated tones, of a spiritualized sensuality, trained in the shades and tints of living all of which is, or perhaps more accurately was, something specifically Viennese.