I SIT at my window and look out upon the housetops and chimneys of Butte. As I look I have a weary, disgusted feeling.
People are abominable creatures.
Under each of the roofs live a man and woman joined together by that very slender thread, the marriage ceremony—and their children, the result of the marriage ceremony.
How many of them love each other? Not two in a hundred, I warrant. The marriage ceremony is their one miserable, petty, paltry excuse for living together.
This marriage rite, it appears, is often used as a cloak to cover a world of rather shameful things.
How virtuous these people are, to be sure, under their different roof-trees. So virtuous are they indeed that they are able to draw themselves up in the pride of their own purity, when they happen upon some corner where the marriage ceremony is lacking. So virtuous are they that the men can afford to find amusement and diversion in the woes of the corner that is without the marriage rite; and the women may draw away their skirts in shocked horror and wonder that such things can be, in view of their own spotless virtue.
And so they live on under the roofs, and they eat and work and sleep and die; and the children grow up and seek other roofs, and call upon the marriage ceremony even as their parents before them—and then they likewise eat and work and sleep and die; and so on world without end.
This also is life—the life of the good, virtuous Christians.
I think, therefore, that I should prefer some life that is not virtuous.
I shall never make use of the marriage ceremony. I hereby register a vow, Devil, to that effect.
When a man and a woman love one another that is enough. That is marriage. A religious rite is superfluous. And if the man and woman live together without the love, no ceremony in the world can make it marriage. The woman who does this need not feel the tiniest bit better than her lowest sister in the streets. Is she not indeed a step lower since she pretends to be what she is not—plays the virtuous woman? While the other unfortunate pretends nothing. She wears her name on her sleeve.
If I were obliged to be one of these I would rather be she who wears her name on her sleeve. I certainly would. The lesser of two evils, always.
I can think of nothing in the world like the utter littleness, the paltriness, the contemptibleness, the degradation, of the woman who is tied down under a roof with a man who is really nothing to her; who wears the man's name, who bears the man's children—who plays the virtuous woman. There are too many such in the world now.
May I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity—a virtuous woman.
Anything, Devil, but that.
And so, as I look out over the roofs and chimneys, I have a weary, disgusted feeling.