II

I have forgotten nature.  I barely know that July, now nearly gone, has passed, sifted with sweetness and ablaze with light.  Time has swept on, the world run round; but I have stood motionless, abiding the hour of my marriage as a tree the season of its leaves.  For all that it looks so calm, within goes on a tremendous surging of sap against its moments of efflorescence.

After which I pray that, not as a tree, but as a man, I may have a little peace.  When Georgiana confessed her love, I had supposed this confession to mark the end of her elusiveness.  When later on she presented to me the symbol of a heart pierced with needles, I had taken it for granted that thenceforth she would settle down into something like a state of prenuptial domestication, growing less like a swift and more like a hen.  But there is nothing gallinaceous about my Georgiana.  I took possession of her vow and the emery-ball, not of her; the privilege was merely given to plant my flag-staff on the uncertain edge of an unknown land.  In war it sometimes becomes necessary to devastate a whole country in order to control a single point:  I should be pleased to learn what portion of the earth’s surface I am required to subdue ere I shall hold one little citadel.

As for me, Georgiana requires that I shall be a good deal like an old rock jutting out of the quiet earth:  never ruffled, never changing either on the surface or at heart, bearing whatever falls upon me, be it frost or sun, and warranted to waste away only by a sort of impersonal disintegration at the rate of half an inch to the thousand years.  Meantime she exacts for herself the privilege of dwelling near as the delighted cave of the winds.  The part of wisdom in me then is not to heed each sallying gust, but to capture the cave and drive the winds away.

For I know in whom I have believed; I know that this myriad caprice is but the deepening of excitement on the verge of captivity; I know that on ahead lie the regions of perpetual calm—­my Islands of the Blest.

Georgiana does not play upon the pianoforte; or, as Mrs. Walters would declare, she does not perform upon the instrument.  Sylvia does; she performs, she executes.  There are times when she will execute a piece called “The Last Hope” until the neighbors are filled with despair and ready to stretch their heads on the block to any more merciful executioner.  Nor does Georgiana sing to company in the parlor.  That is Sylvia’s gift; and upon the whole it was this unmitigated practice in the bosom—­and in the ears—­of her family that enabled Sylvia to shine with such vocal effulgence in the procession on the last Fourth of July and devote a pair of unflagging lungs to the service of her country.