Letters to a Daughter — THE SUBTLE SOMETHING
_June 5, 19—.
_ It is all right, child.
I have not a word of blame, not a word of criticism even.
You are valiant and original.
I am sorry, of course, sorry for you, sorry for him, for myself, for everyone remotely concerned.
But I am congratulatory too.
I congratulate you, him, and myself.
You are prepared for blame of course, for blame from everybody but your own consciousness and your own father.
A young woman who engages herself to a man, remains engaged for nearly a month and then “breaks it off” when there is no conventionally agreed-upon cause for the rupture is, in the eyes of the world, a jilt.
It can’t be helped.
It’s no use grumbling.
The world will have its labels—and small blame to it, they spare it the trouble of thinking, of exercising the faculty of discrimination.
And we upon whom its labels are stuck, must just grin and wear them.
Let us see to it that we do grin and wear them—with a grace.
That “subtle something” of which you can’t say more even to me—there is no need of greater definiteness, I, as always, understand—is the true, almost the only, irremovable hindrance to happiness in marriage, the marriage of sensible people.
Anything does to make fools unhappy.
It is unpardonable and unforgettable.
Unpardonable, because it is not a deed or even a thought or a look; unforgettable because it is always there.
And the worst of it is, it can by its very nature discover itself only in intimacy.
One has to jump into the water before one finds out with certainty that one can’t swim.
That subtle something, so colossal, so inexpugnable yet so elusive!
What is it?
Where is it?
Is it in the blood, or in the brain, or is it some attribute of that unthinkable but must-be-thought-of entity, the Transcendental Ego?
I hate to seem so grossly materialist, but I think it is in the blood, and will be discovered some day by chemical analysis, or by an improved microscopy;
caught and put into a little bottle.
At present only something finer than chemical analysis, personal perceptiveness to wit, can discern it, and it must be the personal perceptiveness of the one most interested.
All the others must needs be the veriest bunglers.
That is why I am not kicking myself to any extent for having thought, in my blindness, my inevitable blindness, that he was all right, that he would do.
He would have done for me, but how could I know that he would not have done for you?
And yet I did just once have the vaguest, dimmest, shadowiest ghost of a suspicion that all was not quite well.
It scurried past me that thought, that thought that was not quite a thought, across the darkness of my mind as a small mouse scurries across a dark room.
It was one night when you had been seeing him off downstairs and we were all in the drawing-room.
When you came back I caught a look upon your face ...
no, something less than that ...
just a flicker across your lips ...
and it made me uneasy, gave me a tiny twinge in that rickety old heart of mine, it kept me awake for an hour or two, as a mouse, fidgeting, has often done.
I am glad of one thing though; that except in the matter of which I could not judge, I did not judge him wrongly.
He _is_ made of the right stuff.
I had a letter from him last night—a letter from a man to a man.
He doesn’t whine, he doesn’t rage, he doesn’t wrangle.
He doesn’t even complain.
He accepts the inevitable.
I think the final test of a man is his attitude in face of the inevitable.
I will never show you that letter—of course you would not wish it.
I feel in a curious way as though it were I and not you who had hurt him.
Once more then, my daughter, you are right.
You have done well.
Let no misgivings on that point ever gnaw or even nibble.
There are not many things that can justify the breach of a betrothal deliberately entered upon.
That subtle something is one of them.
Had the case been reversed, had it been he instead of you who had made the discovery, I should have said the same.
Now let the subject be dropped for ever.
We will not even refer to it, no, not by a look, when you come home next week.
Your approving FATHER.
THE END
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