Man and Maid

When I was in love with Nina--and five or six others--I never thought of

any of these things--I just wanted their bodies: Therefore it is only

when the spiritual enters into the damned thing, I suppose, that one

could call it love. By that reasoning I have loved only Alathea in all

my life. But I am stumped with this thought--If she had one eye and no

leg below the knee--should I be in love with her? and feel all these

exalted emotions about her? I cannot honestly be certain how I would

answer that question yet, so this shows that the physical plays the

chief rôle even in a love that seems spiritual.

Matho--in Flaubert's Salammbô was beaten to a jelly but his eyes still

flamed with love for his princess--But when she saw him as this

revolting mass, did her love flame for him? Or was she exalted only by

the incense to her vanity--and a pity for his sufferings? Heloise and

Abelard were pretty wonderful in their love, but his love became

transmuted much sooner than hers, because all physical emotions were

gone from him. Plato's idea that man gravitates towards beauty for some

subconscious soul desire to re-create himself through perfection, and so

attain immortality, is probably the truth. And that is why we shrink

from mutilated bodies--. Until I can be quite sure that I should love

Alathea just the same were she disfigured as I am--I cannot in justice

expect her to return my passion--.

Nina became re-attracted (if I can coin that word)--because I was out of

reach. The predatory instinct in woman had received a rebuff, and

demanded renewed advance.--She still keeps a picture in some part of

her mental vision of what I was too, therefore, I am not so revolting

to her--but Alathea has not this advantage, and has seen me only

wounded.

I have done nothing to earn her respect--She has apprehended my useless

life in these last months--She has heard the chattering of my

companions, whom I have been free to choose--the obvious deduction being

that these are what I desire--And finally, she knows that I have had a

mistress.--In heaven's name why should she be anything but what she is

in her manner to me!--Of course she despises me. So that the only thing

I could possibly allure her by would be that intangible something which

Nina and Suzette and even Coralie--have inferred that I

possess--"It"!!--. And how would that translate itself to a mind like

Alathea's?--It might mean nothing to her--It probably would not. The

only times I have ever seen any feeling at all in her for me were when

she thought she had destroyed a wounded man's interest in a harmless

hobby--and felt remorse--And the freezing reserve which showed when she

handed me the cheque-book--and the perturbation and contempt when I was

rude about the child.--At other times she has shown a blank

indifference--or a momentary consciousness that there was admiration in

my eye for her.