Master of the Vineyard

No Guarantee

"She's married, and he isn't dead, and they're not divorced. She's married and he isn't dead, and they're not divorced." Rosemary kept saying it to herself mechanically, but no comfort came. Through the long night, wakeful and wretched, she brooded over the painful difference between the woman to whom Alden had plighted his troth and the beautiful stranger whom he saw every day.

"She's married," Rosemary whispered, to the coarse unbleached muslin of her pillow. "And when we're married--" ah, it would all be different then. But would it? In a flash she perceived that marriage itself guarantees nothing in the way of love.

Hurt to her heart's core, Rosemary sat up in bed and pondered, while the tears streamed over her cheeks. She had not seen Alden since Mrs. Lee came, except the day she had gone there to tea, wearing her white muslin under her brown alpaca. There was no way to see him, unless she went there again--the very thought of that made her shudder--or signalled from her hill-top with the scarlet ribbon.

Hugging her Grief

And, to her, the Hill of the Muses was like some holy place that had been profaned. The dainty feet of the stranger had set themselves upon her path in more ways than one. What must life be out in the world, when the world was full of women like Mrs. Lee, perhaps even more beautiful? Was everyone, married or not, continually stabbed by some heart-breaking difference between herself and another?

Having the gift of detachment immeasurably beyond woman, man may separate himself from his grief, contemplate it calmly in its various phases, and, with a mighty effort, throw it aside. Woman, on the contrary, hugs hers close to her aching breast and remorselessly turns the knife in her wound. It is she who keeps anniversaries, walks in cemeteries, wears mourning, and preserves trifles that sorrowfully have outlasted the love that gave them.

If she could only see him once! And yet, what was there to say or what was there to do, beyond sobbing out her desolate heart in the shelter of his arms? Could she tell him that she was miserable because she had come face to face with a woman more beautiful than she; that she doubted his loyalty, his devotion? From some far off ancestor, her woman's dower of pride and silence suddenly asserted itself in Rosemary. When he wanted her, he would find her. If he missed her signal, fluttering from the birch tree in the Spring wind, he could write and say so. Meanwhile she would not seek him, though her heart should break from loneliness and despair.