PART SECOND.
FIRST LOVE, AND LEGAL MARRIAGE.
I.
It is well known how situations like the above would end in former times: a fine young girl, belonging to a low family, an insignificant man who is to become her husband under compulsion, who is detestable to her, who when left to himself, being already a mean man, would constantly grow meaner, but joined to her, comes under her influence, and little by little begins to resemble a man, of no especial account, to be sure, not very good, but, on the other hand, not very bad. The girl at first declares that she will not marry him; but gradually getting accustomed to having him under her command, and being convinced that out of two such evils as such a husband and such a family as her own, the husband would be the less evil, makes her admirer happy. At first it is detestable to her when she finds that she can make her husband happy without loving him; but her husband is obedient,—"patience makes love,"—and she becomes an ordinary fine lady, that is, a women who, excellent naturally, gets reconciled to meanness, and living on the earth only vegetates (literally, obscures the heaven with smoke). Such used to be the way, in old times, with nice young girls, such used to be the way with nice young men, all of whom became excellent people, but lived on earth in such a way as to obscure the heaven. Such used to be the way in former times, because excellent people were very few; the harvest of them, apparently, was so small in old times that there was not one to a ten-acre lot,[1] and no one can live a century as a single man or a single woman without fading away! And thus they either used to fade away or reconcile themselves to meanness.
But nowadays it happens more and more frequently that
- ↑ "Kolos ot kólosa, nyé sluikhat i gólosa," a Russian proverb, meaning that the ear of corn is so far from its neighbor that the sound of the voice cannot reach from the one to the other.
