I. THE TORMENTS OF LOVE.

“They are very much attached to each other, are they not?” asked I of a friend, as we drove past a newly married couple strolling leisurely up the avenue the other day.

“Well, I don’t know,” replied he reflectively. “I think I should say semi-attached. See there!”

I looked just in time to see the husband run up the steps of his club, while the wife, with rather a forlorn smile, signaled a passing omnibus.

“Semi-attached sounds too much like semi-detached,” replied I pensively; and my friend, who is charmingly cynical, finished the thought with:

“Sure to become so, and a good job when it results in unattached. Saves a world of worry and bother.”

Now, was my friend right or wrong? I do not know that I could decide, or rather I have decided so many times, first on one side of the question, and then upon the other, that I will not reveal my present conviction if I can help it, but simply put the question before you, to be decided by each man or woman according to his or her individual experience, observation or inner light.

Is it better to be thoroughly attached to some person of the opposite sex, or to be thoroughly unattached, or having been attached to become semi-attached, and finally altogether detached, which is, of course, a very different thing from being unattached?

Evidently Tennyson considered detachment better than unattachment, for he sang:

But as he was not laureate of America I don’t know that we are bound by his ipse dixit, and I for one question it.

To be attached—that is to be thoroughly and avowedly in love with some one, who is also in love with you and bound to you by some outward and visible tie, so that other people leave you quietly in possession of your own property, is certainly a most blissful and soothing condition.

I will even go so far as to admit that this condition in its perfection is the most satisfactory condition of which mortality is capable.

But then! You have no doubt occasionally blown soap bubbles and watched them float away in the sunshine. Was ever anything more glorious, more perfect in form, in color, in airy grace of motion, than a soap bubble floating in the sunshine of a summer day?

But should you like to invest your entire fortune in pipes and soap and water? Should you like to give up your friends and your home, and arrange all the details of your life solely with reference to the manufacture of soap bubbles?

Of course not. But why? Is not the first reason, and the prominent reason, their evanescence? Is not their delicate brilliancy a very byword for glittering insecurity? Do we not talk of bubble schemes and bubble hopes and bubble promises?

Well, the condition I have specified, the condition we will call the attached, the full fruition of successful love, is even more glittering, more glorious, more ethereal, in its charm, and more evanescent in its duration than the soap bubble. You have only time to say, “Ah, this is the perfection of happiness!” before some flaw, some cloud, some discord comes to mar that perfection which alone is happiness.

The moment you lose absolute perfection you lose content, and there is no happiness without content. To be attached, then, is to have now and again the conviction that you are perfectly happy, and a good many more thousands of times the conviction that you are wretched. Somebody said, “Fear has torment;” but he made a great mistake. Fear has excitement and interest, and the necessity for action, which is always a blessing; but love, if you please, has torment, and plenty of it.

The woman who loves has, as it were, given a general invitation to all the aches and pains, and smarts and worries, and doubts and suspicions, and jealousies and heart-burnings of which the human soul is capable, and they are like poor relations—they accept the slightest invitation to come, and are impervious to all hints to go. If dislodged from one room, they promptly take up their quarters in another. You may neglect or slight them all you choose, may even forget their existence for a time, but when you least expect or wish for them there they are, and there they remain, or if by some rare good fortune they have to go, “the scent of the roses will hang around them still.” You never can forget how long they were inmates; you never can cease referring to them.

The old story of “Scissors” has a deep foundation. The man and wife quarreled bitterly as to whether something was cut with scissors or a knife. The quarrel was made up, “they kissed again with tears,” and all was well, when the wife remarked:

“But, darling, you are convinced now that it was scissors, aren’t you?” “Why, I supposed you’d given in that it was a knife!” exclaimed he, and at it they went again, until he pushed her into the well, and she sank, with her hand thrust above her head, and the first two fingers working like a pair of scissors. What I mean by quoting the story here is that the suspicions and jealousies and resentments of love are never forgotten, although they may be hidden, or even driven outside the door, or drowned in the well. On the very next occasion they thrust themselves above the surface, crying, “Scissors!” and the old battle is to be fought over again.

If any man or woman were perfect, the case would be different; but love, although a magician to make common things appear like glorious things, is not a deity to make them actually so. The fairy gold is far more radiant than earthly gold, but some day you perceive that it is only leaves and twigs, not worth even the silver dollar of everyday commerce for which you bitterly wish you could exchange it. So no sooner does the trusting and loving neophyte become absolutely sure that here at last she has discovered the one perfect man upon God’s earth than the bubble bursts, a little tinkling explosion like a fairy’s laugh, a little spatter of cold water in a startled face, and the poor woman discovers that this man is very like other men, that he is capable of being cross, that he is more or less selfish, that he does not care to spend every hour of his day in her society, that he has other interests, other friends, other correspondents whom he does not choose to abandon; that he cannot say he never in his life looked at any other woman with satisfaction, or if he does say so is probably lying; that he is somewhat dull of apprehension, or is foolishly sentimental, or is an inveterate smoker, or likes cards, or takes a glass too much at times, or has some other or half dozen other of the imperfections flesh—that is to say, masculine flesh—is heir to. Then comes the time when she gives that general invitation to Errinnyes, of which I spoke just now—then comes the time when she learns the lesson that love has torment, and never again forgets it.

Nor must we be so unjust as to forget that the pronouns in the above statement may be reversed, and instead of she you may read he, and readily imagine the discoveries he may make to prove that the goddess of his love, the “one fair, impossible she,” whom he, incredulous of such wonderful fortune, has made his own, turns out just a woman, no better, no worse, than the average, and no greater prize than several hundred others of her contemporaries.

Then, if the man and woman are married—that is to say, if they are attached in the sense in which a yoke of oxen are attached to each other—the process of semi-detachment begins, and according to the nature and the circumstances of the yoke-mates, becomes an internecine, intermural warfare, with alternations of such happiness as is possible where content has fled.

If this state of things goes from bad to worse, as it sometimes does, it becomes the life of two galley slaves, manacled together, and hating each other with a hatred impossible to those who are at liberty.

When things have arrived at this point, just one hope of salvation from utter shipwreck remains—those who once were attached and then semi-attached and then semi-detached, must call upon the law to break the chain it has riveted upon their only too willing wrists, and to pronounce them detached absolutely and without peradventure, each to carry a scarred and wounded member through life, never again to be as they were before they submitted to the bonds they now have broken, and yet both of them thankful to have escaped even “by the skin of their teeth.”

To be perfectly attached, then, is to be perfectly happy, but with a happiness transitory and mocking as the beauty of a soap bubble. To be semi-attached is to be tossed and torn with perplexities and annoyances innumerable. To be semi-detached is to live a life of wrangling, recrimination, suspicion, jealousy and heartburn—in its ultimate stage, a life of such misery and hatred that death or the law’s harsh cleaver must be summoned to break the semi-chain. To be detached is to drag around the scars of the chain, to live a life of bitter memories, and yet more bitter regrets, to be forever murmuring, “It might have been! It might have been!” And so finally we come to the only position left possible for poor, foolish, credulous, loving humanity—the condition of the unattached.

To be unattached is, as I said before, entirely different from being disattached, which is the same thing as being detached. But the unattached is one upon whom the glamor and the thralldom of love have never passed. The unattached person is one who has never blown a soap bubble, and, what is more, does not want to blow one—a person so cold by nature or so sensible by conviction that he sees through the soap bubble business, so to speak, and declines taking any stock in it.

“Yes, pretty enough!” he growls, looking out of the corners of his eyes at the floating, glittering glory, dancing on the summer breeze. “But look there!”

And he points to the empty spot where it has been, and walks away into the shade and the loneliness of his own little nook.

Or, if it is not he, but she, perhaps she remains unattached in quite another fashion. She sees the bubbles, that they are fair and desirable for a moment’s amusement, and she is shrewd enough to see that they are frail as fair, and fit only for the moment’s amusement.

She by no means declines to share in the sport, but in fact eagerly tries to excel it. She blows the biggest bubble of all, and she tosses it most gayly into the sunshine, and she watches it with all her eyes so long as it lasts, and when it bursts she is neither disappointed nor grieved, but blithely turns and blows another as big, as bright, as airy and as transitory. She neither deceives herself nor does she wish to deceive any one else. If some playmate will amuse himself with her at the pretty sport, she welcomes him, and takes it for granted that he understands the nature of soap bubbles as well as she does. If not, it is his own fault—he should have learned the rules of the game.

Do you ask if I mean that it is a good thing to be a coquette and play at love, with no serious meaning in the play?

No; no, indeed. But a coquette is widely different from my ideal unattached woman. The coquette finds her amusement in pretending that the soap bubbles she wafts before the eyes of her victims are solid and true and permanent—round globes, whose surface is all mapped off in realms of paradise, and fortunate isles and mountains of perpetual youth and gardens of golden apples.

She knows better herself, of course, but she is a sorceress, and has the power of making those who come under her spell believe what she will have them, and the more fully they believe the more amusement she finds in the sport. After a while the bubble bursts and the spell is lifted. Then comes the bitter end for the victim, and for the victimizer the very cream of the joke—that is, if she is a real and absolutely heartless coquette, but if she is not there is perhaps a little remorse, a little virtuous resolution and a little quietude. Then more soap bubbles, and the same thing all over again.

But the peaceful and happy “unattached” is one who is so wise, so well-balanced, so self-sufficing, that love has never gained the mastery of his will or his reason—one who is able to care for his friends, and even to dabble and dally with the affections, and yet never give way to them—one who is love’s master and not love’s slave.

Such men there are, and when once in awhile I meet one I look upon him with awe and admiration. I walk around and around him as one does around that tilting stone in Ireland, which may be gently rocked this way and that by the hand of a child, yet resists the strongest man’s efforts to move it from its base. For my part, I would not for worlds move it, even if I could, nor would I move the man who resembles it.

The absolutely unattached woman who does not coquette, and who does not even play at love and never has, is rare, but I have now and again seen her also. She is generally literary or artistic or philanthropic, for a woman must devote herself to something. She is generally plain of visage and of dress. She is a little self-assertive and a little opinionated, for she has never learned love’s sweet humility. She is rather careless of the opinions of others, and thoroughly contented with her own theories of life. She is, as a rule, very sure that love is a folly, or at least, would be for her, and, what is more, it is a thing she does not care to study or consider. She is perhaps the most satisfied and contented of women, but is she the happiest?

That is the question to which I have never yet found a satisfactory reply.

What do you think?