This FreedomHutchinson, A. S. M. (Arthur Stuart-Menteth)
General
This Freedom
Hutchinson, A. S. M. (Arthur Stuart-Menteth)
Marriage -- Fiction; Women -- Social and moral questions -- Fiction
Immensely long he held her, immensely close; oh, men that marry for a
home! Until, come home, she saw Harry’s tremendous happiness in the home
that now she gave him, she never had realised the longing that must have
been his for the home for which he had married, and never till now had
had. It was poignant to her, the sight of his tremendous happiness.
“Always to find you here!” he would cry, in the first weeks of the new
life, coming home to tea and coming in to her in the drawing-room where
she would be, all ready for him, with Doda and with Benji. “Always to
leave you here!” he would say, taking leave of her in the morning, and
she and Doda and Benji coming with him to the hall door to see him off.
“Mice and Mumps,” he used to add in codicil, “Mice and Mumps, I’m a
happy chap!” and was for ever bringing home trifles for her and for the
children, or plans and passes for how and where the Saturday and the
weekend should be spent, all four together. “Mice and Mumps, I’m gorged
with happiness! And you, Rosalie?”
“Oh, happy!” she used to say.
And was. It was poignant to her, his tremendous happiness, and it
brimmed up the cup of her own happiness. She was doing virtuously and
she had of her virtue that happiness which, as the pious old maxims tell
us, comes of being good.
That should have been well; but virtue is a placid condition and the
happiness arising out of it placid. It brims no cups, flushes no cheeks,
sparkles no eyes. It is of the quality of happiness that one, loving a
garden, has from his garden, the happiness of tranquillity, not of stir;
of peace, not of thrills; of the country, not of the town. There was
more heady stuff than this that Rosalie had out of her new condition,
and that was dangerous. She was doing virtuously and she had out of her
virtue an intoxication of joy that, in so far as it is at all concerned
with virtue, arises, not from virtue’s self, but from the consciousness
of virtue. That was dangerous. The danger point in stimulants is when
they are resorted to, not as concomitant of the pleasures of the table,
but be-cause they stimulate. Rosalie, come to her children and her Harry
and her home, to the thought of her renunciation and of her happiness
constantly was turning for the enormous exhilaration of happiness that
there she found. “How glad I am I gave it up! How glad! How glad!
How right I’m doing now! How right! How right! How happy I am in this
happiness! How happy! How happy!”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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