When the meeting ended, the hour was past for seeing Amy. He went to his
room and read law with flickering concentration of mind till near midnight.
Then he snuffed out his candle, undressed, and stretched himself along the
edge of his bed.
It was hard and coarse. The room itself was the single one that formed the
ruder sort of pioneer cabin. The floor was the earth itself, covered here
and there with the skins of wild animals; the walls but logs, poorly
plastered. From a row of pegs driven into one of these hung his clothes--not
many. The antlers of a stag over the doorway held his rifle, his
hunting-belt, and his hat. A swinging shelf displayed a few books, being
eagerly added to as he could bitterly afford it--with a copy of Paley, lent
by the Reverend James Moore, the dreamy, saintlike, flute-playing Episcopal
parson of the town. In the middle of the room a round table of his own
vigorous carpentry stood on a panther skin; and on this lay some copy books
in which he had just set new copies for his children; a handful of
goosequills to be fashioned into pens for them; the proceedings of the
Democratic Society, freshly added to this evening; copies of the Kentucky
Gazette containing essays by the political leaders of the day on the
separation of Kentucky from the Union and the opening of the Mississippi to
its growing commerce--among them some of his own, stately and academic,
signed "Cato the Younger." Lying open on the table lay his Bible; after law,
he always read a little in that; and to-night he had reread one of his
favourite chapters of St.Paul: that wherein the great, calm, victorious
soldier of the spirit surveys the history of his trials, imprisonments,
beatings. In one corner was set a three-cornered cupboard containing his
underwear, his new cossack boots, and a few precious things that had been
his mother's: her teacup and saucer, her prayer-book. It was in this closet
that he had put the lost bundle.
He had hardly stretched himself along the edge of his bed before he began to
think of this.
Every complete man embraces some of the qualities of a woman, for Nature
does not mean that sex shall be more than a partial separation of one common
humanity; otherwise we should be too much divided to be companionable. And
it is these womanly qualities that not only endow a man with his insight
into the other sex, but that enable him to bestow a certain feminine
supervision upon his own affairs when no actual female has them in charge.
If he marries, this inner helpmeet behaves in unlike ways toward the newly
reigning usurper; sometimes giving up peaceably, at others remaining her
life-long critic--reluctant but irremovable. If many a wife did but realize
that she is perpetually observed not only by the eyes of a pardoning husband
but by the eyes of another woman hidden away in the depths of his being, she
would do many things differently and not do some things at all.